You cannot control people while also pushing the limits of humanity, they are mutually exclusive. To ignore this is to ignore religious systems were always about control and order, not progress.
Islamic civilisation would have never existed without Islam the religion. Even if we suppose the Arabs might have expanded into an empire under someone other than Muhammad, the end result would have looked very different. Islam was the glue that held together an empire composed of many different ethnicities, cultures, languages, tribes; without Islam, they would not have had that glue.
> You cannot control people while also pushing the limits of humanity, they are mutually exclusive. To ignore this is to ignore religious systems were always about control and order, not progress.
The first few thousand years of human civilisations were all about power and control. They did a perfectly good job of pushing the then-existent limits of humanity despite lacking individualism. It is only as we get into the modern period that individualism began to produce real benefits (new ideas, science, technology); but without that earlier anti-individualism, it would never have had the economic foundation it needed to produce those benefits. Even in the modern period, the benefits of individualism have mainly been something pursued by the upper and middle classes, economically sustained by the exploitation of the working class and by colonialism.
We also really don't know what the future holds. The religious fundamentalism of the Puritans led to the founding of the English colony of Massachusetts; maybe decades or centuries from now, religious fundamentalists will end up playing a major role in colonising our solar system – they may have motivations to establish colonies that secular people lack.
I'm not aware of a single civilization where free-thinking turned a poor society into a prosperous one. It's always the other way around: free-thinking is a luxury enjoyed by the descendants of religious, orderly, and well-controlled people.