Western Islam

Faeelin

Banned
Okay, Islam in Turkey is different than Turkey in Saudi Arabia, which is different from Islam in Nigeria and Indonesia.

There's a great deal of the native traditions in the Islam of each of those reasons.

So....

It's 811 AD. The last remnants of the infidel Firanji have just been conquered by Harald ibn Aldwulf, one of the Saxon Faithful. Following the victory at Tours, the Muslims continued raiding into France, converting the Bavarians and Saxons.

How does Islam develop along the North Sea?
 

Thande

Donor
Vikings, Germans...at a synod it's decided that pigs are not made out of pork and he really only meant date wine. ;)
 

Faeelin

Banned
Thande said:
Vikings, Germans...at a synod it's decided that pigs are not made out of pork and he really only meant date wine. ;)

The last part wouldn't be news to the Abbasids, or to the Persians.

Thoughts: Epics, perhaps? The Norse went from writing about the Gods to writing about Christ. Why not about Umar and the jihad against the Irishers?
 
Sheesh, why does everyone seem to decide it would be impossible for Europeans to give up pork? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing before they converted to Islam Indonesians and Malays ate as much pork as the rest of Asia (it has been the most popular meat till recently).
 
eschaton said:
Sheesh, why does everyone seem to decide it would be impossible for Europeans to give up pork? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing before they converted to Islam Indonesians and Malays ate as much pork as the rest of Asia (it has been the most popular meat till recently).

Beyond the northern limit of the olive, pork was historically the main source of fat used for cooking...
 

Hendryk

Banned
One big advantage of pigs is that they can feed on just about anything, like chickens actually. So they can be raised in the barnyard, instead of requiring large amounts of pasture, which is the case with cattle (or at least used to be until intensive cattle-rearing was invented). That makes it a very convenient animal, and one whose consumption wouldn't be abandoned without a very good reason--it's anyone's guess as to whether calling it unclean would be good enough for medieval Europeans. We're talking about subsistence societies, a couple of crop failures away from starvation at the best of times.
I also think along with Thande that compromises would have to be made about alcohol. The earlier introduction of tea might go some way towards reducing the taste for alcoholic drink, but it's unlikely it would be given up altogether.
 
Did the prophet (PBUH) actually say anything about beer? Pork would be a major issue (it is the best immediately available source of animal protein and fat in heavily forested northern Europe and while sheep could replace it, that would require large-scale land clearance and still doesn't get you the same productivity, not to mewntion the waster disposal function). But for a north European society to give up wine would not, I think, be a major sacrifice.

All in all I'm sure Islam would find a way of adapting to local usage. Religions generally are good at this, especially in early stages of development, and unlike Christianity, Islam at the time doesn't have a central authority strong enough to enforce what it considers orthodoxy. Islam in a cold climate would just have to look different (not to mention smal things like managing the call to prayer during the 'white nights', or mörketiden)
 
Hmmm, would northern Euro Islam look a bit like Islam in the Balkans up to the early 1990s ? That is, in the case of Bosnian ppl who classified themselves as Muslims, still enjoyed a good bacon sandwich and occasional SLIVOVITZ.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Nobody's giving up any wine. Most of the passages about wine in the Qur'an refer to the fact that it is the drink of Heaven. There's only one passage where it is mentioned somewhat sheepishly that the bad probably outweighs the good, and another where it is mentioned that Satan uses khamr (liquor or strong dring, as opposed to khamra, wine), divining arrows, games of chance, and idols to tempt people away from prayer. In any case, the Arabs never gave up wine, the Persians certainly didn't give up wine, so I don't see why the northern Europeans would, either.

In the hadith, Muhammad is famous for saying that, "if it intoxicates in a large amount, it is forbidden even in a small amount." Thus cooking wine and cigarettes have also fallen under the ban at various times - but never systematically until modern times.

Islam has no hierarchy, so all it would require is one mufti to issue a fatwa to the effect that only strong drink is off limits, and before you know it, wine is back in style. Given that wine is considered to be the drink of choice in heaven, it might be restricted to the ruling class.

At any rate, I don't see why people think that every Muslim is like some kind of machine that fulfills all of the tenets of his religion. The whole point to staying off drink was to ensure that you pray five times a day, right on time, without getting distracted. If you're not already doing that, then abstaining from drink is like closing the barn door after the cows have already left. Most Muslims, as far as I can tell, do not (you can often tell because the devout Muslims who pray daily have a darkish patch on their forehead from where it has hit the ground over the years; the religiously-minded cultivate these patches). Abstaining from wine and pork are not "pillars of Islam," although the kuffar seem to consider them the sine qua non of Islamic religion.

Another facet of an Islamic Europe would probably be the survival of certain indigenous religions alongside Christianity (both orthodox and heterodox) and Judaism. The Middle East was really much more religiously pluralistic than Europe, throughout the premodern period and even in the present day. There were non-Muslims at every level of society - from the court physicians and philosophers to the peasants in the fields - which would be unthinkable in a Christian society up until fairly recently. The Pagans of Harran and the Sabians in southern Iraq are the most extreme examples, next to the Christians and the Jews who played a fundamental role in the formation of the Abbassid state.
 
Ah, but the real question in parts of northern Europe would be whether they had to give up beer or not. Being able to drink wine wouldn't be as useful in places where you can't even grow grapes.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Paul Spring said:
Ah, but the real question in parts of northern Europe would be whether they had to give up beer or not. Being able to drink wine wouldn't be as useful in places where you can't even grow grapes.
The Qur'an and the Hadith are completely silent with regards to Beer. In Arabic, the word itself (biira) is derived from Italian, which just goes to show you how alien beer is to the Arabs. In the absence of any specific prohibition against beer, all it would take is one fatwa from the Mufti of Munich declaring beer to be kosher.
 
The mufti of Munich. I like the sound of that.

I also like the reference to "Harald ibn Aldwulf". The names in an Islamic western Europe would probably sound a little strange to anyone from OTL.

I wonder if the predominant languages of an Islamic Europe would become Arabic-based with a lot of loan words and other influence from the earlier Latin, Germanic, or Slavic languages, or whether they would continue to speak Romance, Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic languages with a lot of loan words from Arabic.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Paul Spring said:
I wonder if the predominant languages of an Islamic Europe would become Arabic-based with a lot of loan words and other influence from the earlier Latin, Germanic, or Slavic languages, or whether they would continue to speak Romance, Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic languages with a lot of loan words from Arabic.
There would be a stable bilingualism for many years among the upper classes, resulting in Arabic exerting just the sort of influence upon the substrate languages as Norman French exerted upon English. This is effectively what happened in Iran. The lexicon of Persian, like English, is maybe 65% foreign loanwords, but the quintessential character of the language (its core vocabulary and grammar) remain Iranian. So, you'd probably get a lot of regional dialects (no Florentine Italian or Parisian French to dominate them all), with a select few gaining in prestige sometime around the 12th century or so and being written in some form of the Arabic alphabet. Eventually even the rulers would become Europeanized (istaghribii) and then the prestige dialects would become national tongues - but never completely dislodge Arabic from its place as the language of Islam. Anyone with pretentions to education will learn both Arabic and the prestige dialect of Romance / Germanic / Slavic, but at home they'd continue to speak their local idioms.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Paul Spring said:
I also like the reference to "Harald ibn Aldwulf". The names in an Islamic western Europe would probably sound a little strange to anyone from OTL.
Good point. Leo, what's your take on the kind of names one would come across in a Muslim Europe?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Hendryk said:
Good point. Leo, what's your take on the kind of names one would come across in a Muslim Europe?
They would most definitely be patronymic. People would be variously described by their patronym (ibn Fulaan or what have you), or their laqab (a kind of nickname - al-Marsiliani for someone from Marseilles, for example, or al-Tawiil, for someone really tall). "European" names would gradually become less and less popular (replaced by names like Isa "Jesus" and Muhammad "Mohamet") except among religious minorities, like the pagans, the Jews, and the Christians. Even so, adopting an Islamic name might be a way of making social progress. Assuming the growth of nationalism as in OTL, old-school names might come back into favor as in Iran, where names like Kambiz (Cambyses) and Darya (Darius) are quite popular.

I'd imagine that the old epics would continue to be very popular, and would probably even be cultivated - to an even greater degree than in OTL. These would also provide a perennial source for onomastics.
 
About beer again:
In Turkey, people use to drink raki (don't know exactly what that is) and saying that Mohammed only forbids wine, but not raki. I bet something like that would happen in Northern Europe too.

Oh, and about the Bosnian muslims: Yugoslavia was Communist after all, and religion wasn't exactly encouraged. If someone'd run around and tell everyone that the prophet forbids alcohol, he'd be suspicious automatically.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Rakı is a kind of hard liquor distilled from the cast off remnants of grapes. It's a bit like grappa in Italy or Ouzo in Greece. It is drunk with copious amounts of water, although some hardy souls take shots.

Incidentally, the name is Arabic (from arrack, sweat), which is probably where the Turks got it. Arrack is still one of the most popular drinks in the Middle East, and the best (by far) comes from a place called Zahle in Lebanon, which is where my relatives are from. There are, of course, local varieties from places all over the Levant, but if you're interested in trying arrack, you must ask for arrack zahlawi to ensure that you're not getting rotgut.

The Slavs would probably make the same argument about vodka.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Leo Caesius said:
Incidentally, the name is Arabic (from arrack, sweat), which is probably where the Turks got it. Arrack is still one of the most popular drinks in the Middle East, and the best (by far) comes from a place called Zahle in Lebanon, which is where my relatives are from.
I wonder--the Mongols have an alcoholic beverage called airak, which is made from fermented mare's milk (human ingenuity when it comes to intoxication knows no bounds :rolleyes: ), and that my mother got to taste when she was there. Do you think there's an etymological relationship? I know that Turkish, as an Uralo-Altaic language, is related to Mongolian, but I don't know if Arabic words could have travelled the other way back to the Eastern steppes.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Isn't that also called kumis? The Turks also have a kind of salty yoghurt beverage called airan, whose name may be related to the Mongol beverage.
 
Ramadan is going to be really brutal when it falls in the summer.

Faeelin said:
Okay, Islam in Turkey is different than Turkey in Saudi Arabia, which is different from Islam in Nigeria and Indonesia.

There's a great deal of the native traditions in the Islam of each of those reasons.

So....

It's 811 AD. The last remnants of the infidel Firanji have just been conquered by Harald ibn Aldwulf, one of the Saxon Faithful. Following the victory at Tours, the Muslims continued raiding into France, converting the Bavarians and Saxons.

How does Islam develop along the North Sea?
 
Top