And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective.
(But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)
It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. I agree with you that science/technology is not contingent on certain individuals and is better understood as a larger historical process. The discovery/invention of calculus is a good example.
I don't agree that political history works the same way, nor do I think that historical actors like Muhammad or Napoleon are simply interchangeable cogs that could have easily been replaced by anyone else. Certainly they were shaped by their circumstances, but I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did.
Technological development and individual political action are two different things. By using discoveries to argue against the theory as a whole, you are setting up a straw man.
Would it make you feel differently if you knew that there were dozens of competing offshoots of Abrahamic religions in the area at the time? What if you viewed the Abrahamic religions as a set of policies and processes that were basically the genetic code of a society. Lots of what is in the Abrahamic texts is about how to conduct transactions effectively, establish a trusting relationship with strangers so you can edify an in-group while conducting trade with outsiders. IMO, his variation was based on determining how to set up an effective merchant society economy among groups of nomads where conflict was minimized enough to get spices from one location to another.
Many elements of islam were consistent among all the different abrahamic religious variations of the time. The fact that islam is so conservative is a result of continued incentives propagating more conservative forms of the religion. It's not inherent to the religion itself. There have been many less conservative islamic societies.
Otherwise yes certainly Islam is as diverse and variant as any other religion and its current iteration (in the Middle East, at least - India and Indonesia being different situations) is mostly a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
We must also draw a distinction between invention/discovery and mass use. I'd like to point at nuclear energy - it seems unlikely that invention or scientific discovery in the field have been slowed down, but mass adoption of the technology was shut down by anti-nuclear activists. Environmentalists had at least a good ten year stretch where nuclear was all but unacknowledged as a good-to-go solution to all the problems being bought up. Even now there is a pretty good chance that with some political cover for the capital investment required it is a better choice for powering a country.
It is actually easy to imagine one motivated, charismatic person in the right place and right time completely changing the practical landscape without any change to the pace of scientific advancement.
Buying books online was inevitable - just a question of time. The invasion of Iraq ( for example ) was not - in the end that came down to one or two people deciding.
