Well that is why Muslims are called submitters by God. "We hear and we obey." Submit to God and find eternal happiness. Become a skeptic and face eternal humiliation. Muhammad's civilization was the best ever and all of them were submitters. You are making arguments from thin air that skepticism and critical reasoning leads to "progress of civilization." You have not defined what progress means and your assumption about the definition of progress probably is wrong, at least from my perspective or that of billions of Muslims.
If we say, which is probably true, that ancient societies were more religious and superstitious then we have to explain away how the heck they still made progress! We went through Bronze Age, Iron Age, Gunpowder regimes etc and what not. That is progress especially when religion held more power than it does today in society's rulers. How can you claim from nowhere that religious is the inhibitory force of society's progress (while disguising the belief that religious skepticism is the driving force of progress) especially when past societies made as much progress even when they were as it were "drowning in superstition?"
