How to keep Islam from growing?
- Thread starter Orko
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Cuāuhtemōc
Banned
Have the Byzantines and Sassanids to repel them from conquering Egypt or the Persian heartland and you pretty much stopped completely [at best] or [at the very least] slow down its expansion.
Can it be done?
Perhaps Islam really is the better religion. More theologically sound and coherent, closer to God, etc., particularly in comparison to Christianity which was a perverse and ramshackle affair awash with corruption.
It is likely that even if the Byzantine and Persian states had held together, Islam would have made significant inroads, as it did in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa.
A unified Arabian peninsula under Islam was going to become a significant economic and military force, and this would have consequences no matter what.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that either the Byzantine or Persian states were capable of holding together. They'd spent previous decades smashing each other to bits, were overextended, depopulating, and literally standing wreckage.
Perhaps Islam really is the better religion. More theologically sound and coherent, closer to God, etc., particularly in comparison to Christianity which was a perverse and ramshackle affair awash with corruption.
It is likely that even if the Byzantine and Persian states had held together, Islam would have made significant inroads, as it did in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa.
A unified Arabian peninsula under Islam was going to become a significant economic and military force, and this would have consequences no matter what.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that either the Byzantine or Persian states were capable of holding together. They'd spent previous decades smashing each other to bits, were overextended, depopulating, and literally standing wreckage.
Might it, in fact, be easier to do the other way round?
This was an era when nomadic peoples - Goths, Huns Avars, Bulgars etc) were on the move all over the place. There's no reason why the Arabs wouldn't join them at some stage, indeed it would be surprising if they didn't. OTOH, none of the others was unified by a particular religion, so it's not obvious that the Arabs needed to be. Kill off Mohammad, and maybe it's Pagan, Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian Arabs (or some mixture of all four) who do the invading.
The problem is that the OP specified that Islam must still exist, so the classic 'No Mohammed' scenario doesn't cut it. Me, I think DValdron has a point, that the Eastern Roman & Persian empires of the time were pretty ramshackle and overextended affairs. Well, I know at least the Eastern Roman was, constantly fighting wars that left its government just short of bankruptcy while plague depopulated the cities and decreasing soil fertility in some of the old breadbaskets depopulated the countryside. And if the Romans had that much of a problem and were still able to keep the Persians at bay, then they must have been in equally shitty circumstances. He's also right about Islam being a damn easy religion to proselytize for; unlike the other great missionary faiths, Christianity & Buddhism, Islam features a very compact and easily explainable central theology in the 5 pillars. Christianity's basic theology varies wildly from one sect (and even one century!) to the next; Buddhism basic theology, though simple, requires a good bit of intellectual prowess to grasp; but pretty much all Muslims, from lunatic fringe Jihadis to contemplative Sufi mystics to modernistic engineers, can pretty much agree on the basic principles of their religion. And I know of no particularly syncretist Muslim heresies, in the way that Voodoo/Santera/Gnosticism took off from Christianity, and some of the weirder Central Asian Mahayana sects took off from Buddhism. So, yea, Islam is a very well-engineered faith, from the point of view of spreading itself.
Still, the massive rise of Islam in the 7th century OTL is pretty awesomely ASB, one of the real defining events of world history. It seems pretty plausible to imagine it petering out somewhere along the way. Now, assuming for now that Mohammed's successors were going to knock the piss out of the Byzantine Romans & Sassanid Persians, they still took a lot of territory that wasn't really controlled by those states. Its easy to imagine them failing to take North Africa or Iberia, for example, though I don't know enough about those campaigns to give any definite POD. In the East, though, I know that the central Asian, east Persian & Bactrian kingdoms & tribes resisted for a century or more after the conquest of Sassanid Persia proper. In fact, their eventual defeat was in large part because of the simultaneous rise of T'ang China squeezed them hard in the middle between the two great powers. But it would have been entirely possible, during the unstable first century of Muslim rule, before the Chinese really started pushing into central Asia again, for one of these kingdoms to come in and take Persia for themselves. Perhaps this could even lead to a Buddhist Iran...
Of course you've got to find some way of preventing the Berbers of the North African hinterland from converting. Once that happens, the Byzantines' thin coastal strip is indefensible. In theory, I suppose, the Visigoths could hold Spain, but caught between Arabs and Franks they are probably doomed in the long run.
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They didn't really until the Banu Hilal and Almoravids. Basically if someone gives the Berbers a good deal before Islam shows up, they are going to take it. That's what made it attractive in the first place (and led to the invasion of Iberia). Returning Christian dominance to the area before events like that is why the "Christian Line" is somewhere east of Algiers in Raptor of Spain.
Avoid this, or at least reduce it to a relativly minor squabble that leaves the Romans and Persians more or less undamaged.
Al Walid's forces get bounced, and Islam becomes a faith of merchants spread largely by missionaries along the Indian Ocean trade.
HTG
yourworstnightmare
Banned
Yes, avoiding the Byzantine- Sassanid war is a must if you want to weaken Islam.
Even if you avoid the war, Islam can take Persia unless you've somehow given a large segment of the Persian nobility a brain transplant. Insanity had started to gallop in the Sassanids, but they had just enough lucidity in the last two generations to execute however much of the provincial nobility was necessary to give every sociopath with a messiah complex the imperial line turned out his own province. It probably would have collapsed in civil war inside of a decade even without Islam.
Avoiding the war makes Byzantium keeping Egypt seem fairly plausible though. And depending on hom patient you are, you can jigger the Mongols to take Islam down two pegs without them bothering Europe I suppose.
Avoiding the war makes Byzantium keeping Egypt seem fairly plausible though. And depending on hom patient you are, you can jigger the Mongols to take Islam down two pegs without them bothering Europe I suppose.
Unless you believe in a VERY intrusive God, it is completely possible for a better religion to fail to win recruits -- or for the perfect, ideal religion to completely fail to emerge at all! (There is another theory which states that this has already happened.)
Riain
Banned
What about the Copts being a power bloc on their own? IIUC good chunks of the Mid East, Egypt etc were Coptic Christian and these got persecuted by the Byzantines. WI during the Persian wars these revolted and formed their own Coptic Empire and then fought the Muslims to hold their own religious and political independence? Just throwing it out there.
Rex Romanum
Banned
I think the best way to do this is to have Maurice didn't overthrowned by Phocas, which mean no Khosrau II's war of conquests and no Heraclius' war of reconquests...
When Muslims came, Maurice's successor (Theodosius III? Tiberius III?) and Khosrau II's successor (Kavadh II? Ardashir III?) could work together to expelled them out of Mesopotamia and Levant, and then...voila, we get an Arabian-confined Islam...
When Muslims came, Maurice's successor (Theodosius III? Tiberius III?) and Khosrau II's successor (Kavadh II? Ardashir III?) could work together to expelled them out of Mesopotamia and Levant, and then...voila, we get an Arabian-confined Islam...
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
I think it would be fairly easy to confine it to Arabia, but hard to keep it from spreading eastward, as Arab traders dominated the Indian Ocean, and it was through them, not conquest, that Islam spread down the East African coast and to the Indes.
I have to wonder how the development of Islam & Christianity would have been affected? In OTL, there was a sharp geographical border between Byzantium and Islam with a no-man's land between. There is no such barrier between Arabia and the rest of the Levant. Also, without a powerful Caliphate, would Iconoclasm ever gain impetus? And what happens to the sciences? Without a strong Muslim presence in the Med basin, how badly is Western development retarded?
I have to wonder how the development of Islam & Christianity would have been affected? In OTL, there was a sharp geographical border between Byzantium and Islam with a no-man's land between. There is no such barrier between Arabia and the rest of the Levant. Also, without a powerful Caliphate, would Iconoclasm ever gain impetus? And what happens to the sciences? Without a strong Muslim presence in the Med basin, how badly is Western development retarded?
If you confine Islam to arabia then it would be a purely arab ethnic religion similar to Judaism.
It was the conquest of other higher cultures, especially Persia that made Islam more cosmopolitan and therefore more accessible to non Arabs.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Don't forget that Islam came after Christianity was a universal religion. Islam was conceived as the final revelation, superseding the older religion.
Except it is Arab traders that are trading and in fact settling down all around the Indian ocean. If they did intermarry with locals it makes sense that they would bring their religion as well.
Not to mention the Qur'an is pretty much explicitly evangelical.
Good questions all, but Islam only really took off east of India after the decline of the Cholas, so I think it's too early to say how far east it will spread based on traders alone especially if they are based in the deserts and marginal areas. It probably will be confined to traders in the Byzzie Middle-East: "Islam? Oh it's that weird religion the barbarians practice in their tents." Sciences are interesting too but how many discoveries were made by Persians? It's not crazy to think that a reborn Sassanid or some other native dynasty might not also preside over a scientific expansion. Maybe India fills a niche more directly as well in a limited-Islam scenario.
From what I can recall, most of the Islamic discoveries didn't start filtering into Europe until around the Crusades (not just the Crusades, but in general around 1100s). So history might precede in a recognizable fashion for some time in Europe (bar Spain).