Its not as simple as that. I will reply later with a more detailed response but a common religion most certainly helped the Islamic empires (whether Arabs or Persians or Mughals) immensely by providing an almost contiguous corridor of co-coreligionists stretching from Anatolia all the way to India; this greatly facilitated trade.
Islam helped drive large projects that wouldn't have been completed in one's life time. One admirable attribute of Islam is that they can plan ahead like the west use to do with tunnels and bridges for example, nowadays projects are not planned to take more than 20 years, in the Muslim world they still are.
Does that have anything to do with Islam or more with autocracy? I'm not being snarky, I live in Saudi Arabia and certainly see the benefits of having an autocratic government for some things. I'm not sure religion plays a bigger role here in planning than it would anywhere else, though.
Good point. I think its a little bit of both. I don't think you need autocracy as much as a strong state: and Islamic states were pretty strong. But the common religion basically meant that a muslim in India could travel to Baghdad and have something in common. It meant that technological advancements in one part of the world would travel faster to the other. That skilled people could travel to different countries...and religious scholars as well. I believe this contributed a lot to the progress in Islamic society during this time.
