because the document is fucking old

It’s also fucking opaque. Much of the Qur’an is written in a highly allusive, poetic way, referencing events and controversies that there’s little to no extra-Quranic historic record of. Often it’s not possible to connect a particular sura to anything at all. There’s a considerable body of personal accounts of the life of the Prophet and the time after him (hadith) with varying degrees of credibility, and a huge amount commentary on the Qur’an and the hadith accumulated over many centuries (tafsir, kind of like the Talmud). Much of the actual practice of Islam is a combination of ancient local practices (e.g., women being fully veiled, which was a pre-Islamic Persian custom not practiced in Arabia), accretions of interpretations of religious texts, and traditions.

Stop giving the absolute monarchy that regularly executes dissidents, journalists, and queer people the benefit of the doubt via whataboutism and false equivalencies between Saudi Arabia and the Middle East as a whole.

Yeah, Saudi Arabia is a corner case. It’s sort of the Arabian equivalent of a US bunch of hillbilly glossolalist snake-juggling bigots, who found themselves sitting on a lake of oil. But in other parts of the MENA, you can find highly sophisticated urban people who make most Americans look like hicks, and ancient communities sustaining millennia of cultural continuity. The diversity of the region is extreme.