JDB, first off yuh can't compare islam with no other belief system in the world today, bc islam also caters to a wide range of the human condition. governmental, spirituality, judicial, social interaction, business to etiquette. in arabic islam is known as a deen (diin) which would means more than anything else in the english translation (a way of life/ life style).
the quran unlike the bible, has one author, and in all those pages there are guide lines dealing with most aspects of the basic needs of humankind. the bible mainly the new testament, talks mostly of apocalyptic events and preparing for the great beyond, whereas the quran has more of a balance approach to life.
it addresses the main aspects of a social setting providing answers for the problems that normally plague societies, it legislates, it prioritize, it advocates for order and justice, it adjudicates, it governs, there are so many things that islam offers the society that cristiandom and judism utterly lack.
some people may say that it intrudes on individual rights, and could be viewed as totalitarianistic in nature, which is true, and here's where the two headed monster rares it's ugly head!
for centuries in the muslim world, most their leaders who themselves were totalitarians used islam as a political system in which to govern the masses with an iron fist, but they totally ignored the other aspects of the "deen" adhering only on the political and spiritual aspects, which created more of a problem than a solution.
what we're seeing today is nothing new in the muslim world, this has been going on for centuries off and on. as for what you addressed as being backward, or the dark ages rhetoric of (religion), i hope you know that the term "dark ages" did not apply to the islamic world?
as ah matter of fact that term was coined by the europeans to describe their own condition in that period in time. during the "eropean dark ages" muslims were @ the pinnicle of their glory days with bagdad being the epicenter for learning and the sciences, it was an islamically runned state under the abassid empire.
it's a known fact that religion did not affect or hamper the advancement of this society, as a matter of fact incredibly great minds issued out of such societies like the abassid ruled bagdad and andelusia who were for the most part muslims.
minds like ibin ishaq al kindi a polymath scientist, one of the greatest minds of the 9th century. thabit ibin qurra one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and a contemporary of al kindi. abbas ibn firnas a great scientist and inventor, abu bakar zakariya al razi was a versitile scientist who was an expert on many subjects, he was the one who identified measles and his studies lead to the realization that fever was a part of the body defense mechanism.
then we have ibn arabi, my faovorite, astronomer , astrologer, poet and sage, this man identified all the planet in our solar system even before galeleo's invention of the telescope, and all these men were religious, as ppl like to call it, and lived in a religious islamic state at the time.
all this talk about religion being the opium of the masses, and had not the western societies not move away from the church and became secularist the society would be in stagnation and arrested development is a blatant lie, and a ploy of the modernist to push their godless agenda in schools and university, in books and on the mainstream media.
the fact iz some of the greatest minds of all time came out the church, synogogues and mosques, and at a time when europe was in darkness is proof that religion does not arrest progress, it's just that the media have an interest in maligning certain religions hence the reason for all this propagation of showing up islam in a complete and utta dogmatic light.