The Qur'an makes it abundantly clear that any form of ursury is absolutely forbidden and, in a literalist reading at least, would result in being sent to the hell fires.
I am pretty sure alcohol is banned as well. Some muslims I know from India and Pakistan drink alcohol and borrow money. The muslims that are family relations though don't do that. They are strict though. I'd call them fundamentalists. They live in Saudi Arabia but their kids come back to Australia to finish their schooling. One boy was too soft so they sent him to one of those Madrasa camps in Lebanon.
The girls (like 3 or 4 now) come to Australia and finish their schooling. They can drive here and they can't in Saudi.
I have a friend from work who is a Jain. They don't believe in any violence at all. The funny thing is he told me his parents still gave him a belting when he deserved it. He also gets on the grog but doesn't tell his parents.
Attitudes to alcohol vary a lot, the Qur'an does forbid drunkeness but arguably does not categorically forbid modest consumption of alcohol There have also been debates about wine vs other alcoholic drinks. There is a movement in modern Islam called the Qur'anist which have sought to focus solely on the Qur'an and reject the authority of the hadiths. This has paved the way for more liberal interpretations of Islamic law, as well as violent ones. Not that the hadiths are all necessarily 'bad' - some are highly aligned with modern values such as promoting disabled rights and animal rights.
In Turkey you'll see Muslim girls knocking back the shots wearing short skirts in nightclubs built literally next door to mosques. I doubt you'll see that in Saudi Arabia which doesn't trust women to even drive cars. Across the water in Iran, over half of all graduates are women and it has female politicians. Indeed by some measures women's status in Iran has improved at lot since 1979.
As you rightly say, people take religion in different ways.
I agree. It's actually a joke. The bigger problem is people don't understand what they are talking about and they portray their opinions based on false premises as facts.
I tell you what I think the problem is. There are real issues out there that require political action. Some great examples are getting vaccinated for COVID or trying to move towards more sustainable energy production to not impact the worlds ecology too significantly.
These issues are then managed via statistical models which are designed to paint a picture. The problem is these models are often way off base and people quote them as fact. The trick is to understand what these models are and they are typically nonsense. They are used for policy decisions but you shouldn't be taking their predictions as gospel.
I worked in data my whole career and studied some statistics. I am far from an expert but I know the inherent problems in modelling. I'm going to give you a flip side response which I find hilarious. I had a guy recently tell me via Bayesian statistics how PCR tests were completely ineffective. I don't understand Bayesian statistics and this guy worked as a labourer or something. The guy with all due respect didn't have an intelligence or education level above my 11 yo son at best. Yet he is quoting completely dodgy statistics to argue his stupid irrational point.
I'm sick of hearing people who are uneducated and inexperienced and don't have a clue what they are talking about making out they are smart educated experts.
Luckily, I have a full head of hair and stopped pulling out my hair when I heard Bill Gates demand testing EVERYONE without acknowledging that even if tests were 99% accurate, testing all Americans would result in 3.3 million false positives (multiples of the actual infections). Gates either didn't understand basic high school stats (and 100% funding IHME providing the stats government used for estimating future infections) or was lying for effect and manipulation. If tests were 95% accurate, there would be 16 million false positives and create mass panic (unless this was the whole purpose of the exercise). The Stats for Dummies I covers all this (Stats for Dummies II covers more complex topics) and would have saved the world $11,000,000,000,000 - $0.77 (used version).
The last one would be funny to ask him if he thinks the error term is homoscedastic or heteroscedastic based on the time from initial infection or based on the individuals age/BMI/IQ/SWR/AUM and see if their brain explodes or provides a coherent response. Or if he's more worried about Type I or Type II errors and why? Or if he knows how to set up a hypothesis test and what a positive test even means (rejection of Null at some significance level).
Bayes would be an issue when testing asymptomatic people and not knowing the p of having Omicron vs having simple cold or flu symptoms. I am not a Bayes expert, but assume even the scientist with the most advanced collection techniques would struggle estimating priors with almost no history of all the variants... but it's easier to just repeat some YT's rant.