I know Muslims. They are all -- prepare for a shock -- individuals. The women are not enslaved, but own their own property (as the Quran mandates they may) and have jobs. The men don't beat their wives. Nobody blows up children.

Those acts of violence are the acts of desperate people who lack control over their greater world, and so attempt to overcontrol their personal world. In their rage and despair they become criminals. Islam didn't make them that way. They choose that path themselves.

Now I live in an overwhelmingly Christian area. Children are beaten to death here. Women are shot by their husbands and boyfriends. Does that make Christianity a religion that condones the murder of children and women?

I used to bowl with a lovely woman whose husband said she was too fat (at 5'5" and 120 lbs.), so he bullied her about it. She appealed to her minister, who told her that it was her duty to be subject to her husband. She lost weight until she became emaciated, she quit the bowling league because we kept telling her to stop and were thus a temptation, and she withdrew from the world. This is abuse too, countenanced and supported by a Christian church, and yet I don't maintain that Christianity is a religion of bullies and control freaks.

Some interpretations of Christianity apparently support bullies and control freaks, though.

You, on the other hand, appear to be certain about the character of Islam based on whatever web pages you read.