It always strikes me as a bit ironic when people complain about the "violent religion of the middle east" and how it's going to take root in the west and ruin everything.
Religion from the middle east already took root in the west a long time ago. It was called christianity. Nearly all major religions nowadays came from the middle east*, they crushed the greek and roman pantheons a long time ago. They laughed at the nordic religions. They didn't even notice the native religion in the Americas! They steamrolled thier way through the world, and you are part of it right now!
They degrade them because "They fight each other, over the differences in their religions", but they don't even realise that with christianity being from the same abrahamic god, christian/islamic conflict is the same thing as sunni/shia conflict, but just one step up the scale!
That brings the question though, what is it about religions in the middle east that makes them so much more effective than religions that came from elsewhere? Why has religion from this one part of the map managed to dominate so much of the globe?
*yea, I know hinduism and buddhism and ect.. exist. They haven't spread and dominated quite the same though.
You should read both the Quran and the Bible and make your own decision as to why this is.
Or you could bother giving a proper answer.
The reasons behind why Christianity and Islam caught on are many. Notice that Judaism remained rather small, as far as these go.
First and foremost is that while nearly every religion is very much tied a culture, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are not. That's one reason for these three to be pretty successful. Christianity was not seen as the "religion of the hebrews" (that was Judaism), but as the "religion of the Christians". Who are the Christians? Why, anyone who believes in what they do, culture of origin be damned.
Second is that they (not Buddhism though) are very pro-active when it comes to conversion. Pagan religions don't care much about conversion, mostly because for pretty much everyone except the abrahamics other religions are also partially right. Romans were good at securing conquered territories because they didn't force their religion on others. Instead, they even adopted gods from other cultures because they believed that everyone was at the very least partially right as far as metaphysics go. If everyone is partially right, you don't need to "correct" them to the True Ways. Christianity and Islam are: "I am the One True Religion, and you will be tortured eternally if you don't accept the truth".
Things kind of diverge for those two, however, at this point.
Christianity was very much a pacifist religion in its initial stage. It was persecuted by the romans for various reasons, but the main being: insisting, as mentioned above, that they were the only right tradition; that the roman gods were aspects of the Adversary; refusing to mingle with the rest of roman society; having some rituals that sound extremely horrifying if you know nothing about them (eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus (cannibalism), baptism (drowning babies), etc). But when emperor Constantine converts, being christian shifts from being political and social suicide to being pretty much required if you had any ambitions. Sure, those people may not have all been true believers, but their kids would be raised from birth as part of the religion, having faith and wanting to spread it as per its doctrines.
Islam, meanwhile, took the militaristic path. With quite a few exceptions, the Arabic peninsula was united by force of arms, as was the rest of the Islamic empire that arose shortly after Muhammad's death/ascension. Islam also had a very interesting, and extremely effective, tactic for converting people: non-Muslims had to pay a special tax that Muslims didn't. So if you didn't want to, or couldn't, pay, you converted. What I said at the end of the paragraph above also applies here.
Also, and this applies to both, when you see a conflict between groups of two different religions as an extension of the conflict between their deities, some people would rather join the winning side, making it win even more, causing more people to convert and feed the cycle.
Kind of busy, but PM me if you want sources and I'll eventually send them to you when I'm un-busy.
EDIT: More exposition, but only on Christianity since I studied it in quite a lot more depth than Islam.
Christianity, and
especially the Catholic Church, has been extremely flexible as well. They co-opted a lot of traditions from other religions and cultures that converted, such as Christmas being when it is (more or less during the roman saturnalia, for instance). During the conversion of Ireland, the Pope conveniently overlooked the fact that many irish priests were polygamous. Quite more recently, during the conversion of the Tlaxcaltecs in Mexico, the religion only took off after a Mexican peasant had a vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who had Mexican features rather than European ones, speaking to him in Nahuatl.
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