I've read and thought about this for over a decade, and I would say the following:
A simple question, but there's not a "yes" or "no" answer, or at least not a meaningful one. Islam is not a monolithic entity anymore than Christianity is. I don't think that Christians would argue it would be fair to lump all of Christianity into one umbrella theology and ask a generalized question. Largely, this is because many of them believe widely disparate things, most of which cannot be solved by a simple inspection the words of the Bible. It's not difficult to guess then that Islam would be similarly complex, and it is.
To the question: It can be very violent, it can be very progressive. It depends heavily on the interpretation. The Qur'an itself is very violent, contains very unfortunate passages, anti-semitism (as well as comments supporting Jews, behold the contradiction of religion), and so forth, all of which is unfortunate given the prevalence of Islam today. So when commentators like Sam Harris claims that the Qur'an makes it very easy to be violent, there's nothing
prima facie wrong with that, although to stop there (as Harris does) would be academically negligent, although typical. I'll pause for a second and note that there's also very good verses in the Qur'an, which should be compared to Christianity (or at least its cultures), such as making sure that the poor are kept fed and upholding the principles that all races are equal (In fact, it's this issue that got Malcolm X to back off of black nationalism and start believing in racial equality and diversity, so the positive import of these verses has influenced the West positively, even if negligibly).
So the real question is "Which interpretation is being used, and why?" Like all ideologies, a huge portion of them are driven by emotional reasoning, and that informs the interpretation. Well, that's fairly predictable in terms of results. People in oppressed communities tend to react violently and use religion, politics, etc, as a guise for their violent outbursts. Sometimes they act out what's literally in the texts (and then the texts must take some blame), but a lot of times it's only tangential. We did this against the USSR, which we deemed "godless" and so we countered with "Christian values" and "In God We Trust", although religion had very little, if anything, to do with the Cold War. People in well-established countries with comfort? They tend not to be so pissed off, and they tend not to conduct nearly as much violence. There's notable exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia. For example, Osama bin Laden lived a rather comfortable existence as the son of an oil baron, was Western educated, and so forth, but nevertheless he was a "true believer" in the most dangerous sense, just like the Christian Robert Dear or the Muslim SB shooters (Though the chief difference being that bin Laden had the money to back entire militias and networks, and he did so at the cost of millions of lives).
So literalists exist, but even then only a small number of them are militant reactionaries. Most Muslims, literalists or otherwise, don't believe in a violent version is Islam and virtually every Muslim does not believe in conducting violence in the name of Islam (That's an empirical claim,
it can be verified and has been). Most Muslims are against the US not for simple religious reasons, but comparing to terrorist statements (e.g. take bin Laden's so-called justification for 9/11), you'll find that the predominant concern and driver of terrorism in and related to Islamic states is Western imperialism. Yes, it's draped in religiously language, yes the texts are wonderful for driving small groups of fringe lunatics, and so forth, but most of the driving factor is terrestrial geopolitical (Western imperialist) concerns. And that should come as no surprise; Wahhabi/Salafi Islam has been around for 300 years, but only gained followers after the extensive Western and Soviet imperialism of the 1950's and on wards. Again, the results are fairly predictable (cf. Irish Republican Army, which
also used religion as a guise for its terrestrial grievances, although to a lesser degree than, say, Hamas or ISIS).
