They do seem to be, don't they? As a whole, they have not accomplished much - other than spawning hate, death & destruction. For centuries they've polluted the world with their sickness, I can't help but think about what wonderful things mankind could be doing right now if we didn't have to waste so much time protecting ourselves from them & cleaning up their messes.
Ditto that!
“For centuries they’ve polluted the world with their sickness,”
but before that, they knew more than the west in the late middle ages on some subjects. I don’t have a problem with Islam in history; they have done what anyone with power and numbers has done. The christian crusades and various territorial actions (including the new world) are little better if that.
religion has always been a good mechanism to manipulate people into either fighting or supporting a war (this includes christianity, the vatican is one of the bigger offenders in western history post-western-empire, even without including such important unintended events as the sack of constantinople by the 4th crusade) but the major problems with islam **today** are 1) radical wahabbism (thank you saudi arabia) and 2) Iran.
Unfortunately, neither seems particularly amenable to 21st century western solutions.