I've read plenty of neutral sources on Islamic history and a few books by moderate Muslims like Tamim Ansary. My favourite poet is definitely Kahil Gibran, and that region certainly has contributed to the advancement of the human race in the past.

But I gotta say, knowing the origins of Islam doesn't make me the least bit sympathetic towards the Islamic world. Any more than knowing about Christianity would? I don't like either of them.

The rightly guided Kalifa's couldn't even get to leader number four before they had a disastrous rift. Some great plan that Allah gave Mohammed there, it couldn't even clarify whether successors should be given preference based on blood-line relationship to Mohammed or not...that's a pretty shitty plan for how society's (ummah) supposed to run, when you think about it critically. Almost as if all that shit Mohammed said didn't actually come from an all-knowing being...hmmm. And I've heard all the weak arguments about how it wasn't the fault of Mohammed's message for society that the Sunni/Shia split happened. How to choose successors was not fleshed out well enough. Full fucking stop. It TOTALLY is the fault of the message. In the same way Das Kapital was a great work, and Communist Manifesto was a half-arsed political pamphlet that Marx didn't even really want to write. In the same way that any other system fails to account for human nature, Mohammed's plan from God is just shit, and it failed, it failed fucking quickly. Just because Islam spread rapidly across massive swathes of illiterate agricultural people who were unlikely to ever travel more than 10 miles from where they were born isn't as much of a big deal as some people think, after all, Christianity did the same. Ever had to deal with a hardcore Filipino Christian...Jesus, those guys ran with it.

So yeah, educate yourself about Islam...because it's about as unimpressive and sad as Christianity or any other old World horseshit.