I'm guessing it's like Christianity where there are leftist Christians who follow Jesus' more progressive messages such as giving to the less fortunate and healing the sick, and then there are the scary Christian evangelicals that want A Handmaids Tale and conversion therapy. Logically, Islam probably isn't a monolith in a similar way other religions aren't.
However, I have never heard about what those of the Islamic faith actually believe outside of the hysterical post 9/11 Islamophobia I've been indoctrinated with as a child.
I want to know what the truth is and hear the other sides story. To me it's obvious that Islamophobia is wrong, however when Islamophobes make wild claims about it, I can't really refute them confidently because I'm simply ignorant of the facts. Please educate my dumb, white ass.
One difference about Islam is that it appeared all at once, instead of emerging out of a cultural milieu over multiple centuries like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism did. You have the Quran and you have Muhammad recognized as its author and the final prophet and the founder of the religion, there's not a whole lot of room for debate about what the Quran says.
Not sure I understand your point, the Bible is as central to Christianity as the Quran to Islam. There is a definitive and large intersection of books that every christian bible contains, so you can point to a lot things in the bible that almost every christian will agree is in the bible. And the rest is as wide and varied as which Hadiths are accepted and which aren't.
My point was that Islam, as Christianity, is more than the book. A lot of muslims dont read the Quran. A lot of muslims that read the Quran don't understand arabic. A lot of muslims live Islam by picking and choosing what "sounds right" from what the people around them are saying, fitting it into their worldview, molding it into something unique to them. My experience of Islam was that it was a lot more oral tradition and open to superstitions than my experience of christianity. Muslim friends would trade religious views by saying their mom said this and then the other couldn't really go against what his mom said, because she's his mom and if it's that important to him, fine. Whereas in my experience of christianity people would immediately whip out the bible and start throwing verses back and forth sometimes even breaking out some ancient greek dictionary. So people might say that according to Islam whoever does not accept the prophet goes to hell, then point to this verse or that hadith, but a lot of muslims I met said that it doesn't matter as long as we all believe in the same God. And that's what these people of "Islamic faith", to quote OP, believe.
I had a teacher who said pork wasn't haram, Allah just said it was because back in the Prophets time people didn't know about proper food hygiene but they do now. There was a huge trend in my school with a very specific ritual involving bread that fell on the floor because wasting bread was seen as a sin. Some kids were uneasy with my infidel ass going to the mosque to drink water. There was a lot of superstition and tradition inextricably linked to Islam depending on the local culture which invariable affects how the Quran is interpreted or whether people just choose to live with certain contradictions in their belief system. And saying that "Islam is X" is almost always wrong as it would have to describe something common to every muslim there is.
There is no objectively true Islam, it's nothing material. Islam is not something that exists but it describes a wide and varied collection of different beliefs, rituals, expressions and so on. Even if you point at something in the Quran and say "See Islam teaches this, it's in the Quran" there will be so many different interpretations of that thing that you will not be able to find a intersection contained in all.