Al Mutahirin or Al Mutahirun would be the right arabic word. Almotahirids probably the latinized one.
Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline
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Not to drive Planet of Hats bonkers, but isn't taharah feminine? so -at should be the right ending?
Planet of Hats
Donor
*screams in Google Translate*
I seem to recall Snassni being either a native speaker of, or familiar with, Moroccan dialects of Arabic which fall pretty close to what I've used when I've dabbled in linguistics for Andalusian Arabic.
If so then by all means throw every word I have said out the window, take his word for it habibi.
No, at is not used for tahara. The -atou ending is just a poetic form to make it fit into certain sentences.
Almutahirun/rin is used here to describe a group of people.
Arabic is very complex.
AcT III Part XV: Ibn al-Layth
Planet of Hats
Donor
"I feel like I'm wrecking this place somehow just by being here," Feyik murmured in wonder as he and Iqal stared up at the old bookcases looming all around them.
Blushing a little, Iqal wove one hand into his hair and hunched his shoulders. "Tell me about it," he muttered, letting his eyes wander from shelf to shelf. The room itself was not the largest they'd visited during the trip - a fair-sized sitting room, but lined with old shelves, clearly painstakingly maintained over the years and bedecked with heavy tomes and codexes, some of them seeming to be older than time itself.
Perhaps less inspiring, but no less imposing, were the velvet-trimmed length of cord politely separating the students and their teacher from the shelves, as well as the signs exhorting them not to touch anything.
As the students browsed through the museum, Iqal found his gaze drifting towards his professor, only to start as he realized he wasn't the only one looking. Dr. Mirza chuckled simply and shook his head.
"You're hardly tainting the place," the professor assured. "You're in a house of learning, after all. Ibn al-Layth was probably used to having people coming to him to learn."
"Ah... yeah, maybe," Iqal conceded with a sheepish smile, gaze drifting through the room, towards a couple of roped-off chairs and an elegant table set nearby. Recreations, of course - the house had changed hands too many times over the years for things like that to survive.
"I wonder how they knew what kind of chair Ibn al-Layth was sitting in," the young man murmured with quiet wonder.
"They don't," conceded Dr. Mirza as he moved to stand beside the two students. "Part of studying history is a process of deductive reasoning and educated inference. The same goes for naturalism,[1] when you get right down to it. We may never objectively know what kind of chair Ibn al-Layth owned. But we can infer it based on what we do know about Andalusi furnishings and the means of the scholarly class during this period."
"Hold on," Feyik put in with a blink. "Since when do we know what furniture from a thousand years ago looked like?"
Dr. Mirza smiled pensively. "Surprisingly there have been chairs from centuries ago found. Things like tables. Stools. Other furnishings. They constructed things in those days as if you were investing in something truly luxurious. In fact, this period is something of the start of an age of inspiration."
Furrowing his brows, Iqal squinted at the chair for a moment, letting hiseyes travel the lines of it - bronze framing, elegant cushions in complex geometric patterns, workmanship like someone had slaved over it for decades just to get it right. It was the sort of thing you would never find at a furnisher's store these days.
"Why were people so inspired?" he asked. "I mean, to make... chairs. And to be Ibn al-Layth."
"Well," Dr. Mirza said with a tilt of his head, folding his arms. "We talk about the Rule of the Slaves sometimes just based on politics. But it was also a time when a lot of new avenues in high society were opening for indigenous Muslims in this part of the world. A lot more creative people had a lot more opportunities in those days. Skill and imagination were a lot more important."
Iqal nodded, taking stock of the chair again, then turning his gaze back to the books. Not for the first time, he wondered if someone of his bloodline had once wrought chairs like that, or written tomes like those, or sat in a library just like this one.
Excerpt: Falcons of Early Naturalism - Abdullah Ghazi, Naturalist Documentary Press, AD 1964
Ibn al-Layth (Abu' l-Hasan Aamir ibn Tariq ibn al-Layth)
AD 1033 (Tlemcen, Maghrib) --> AD 1114 (Al-Jazirah, Andalusiyya)
Of the great early naturalists associated with the cultural and intellectual flowering which took place during the period known as the Rule of the Slaves, Ibn al-Layth is considered among the most eminent. His contributions to naturalism came to exercise a great impact on the daily lives of Andalusians, and later on the broader Muslim world. The advances in medicine and personal cleanliness he pioneered made daily life better and healthier, once fully embraced.
Born in Maghrib during the reign of al-Muntasir, the son of a well-respected Berber family with a history of public service, Ibn al-Layth fled his hometown of Tlemcen in the 1060s during the early days of the rise of the Al-Mutahirin movement. He landed in the port of Al-Jazirah but soon traveled north to Qurtubah, where he pursued advanced studies in philosophy, theology and in particular the nature of medicine.[2] However, while he grew up in an atmosphere in which rigorist interpretations of the Quran ran rife, with the ultra-intense fixations of the Purists firmly in the background of his learning, Ibn al-Layth seems to have been nothing less than a skeptic's skeptic, approaching learning through a thoroughly non-mystical mindset.
Perhaps the most remarkable trait of Ibn al-Layth as a thinker was his conceit that logic and faith did not contradict each other. An admirer of classical learners, particularly the Greeks, he seems to have held a hope of demonstrating the greatness of Islam by proving the rightness of God and His works not only through faith, but through empirical logic utterly undeniable to any reasonable audience. In his early writings, Ibn al-Layth posits that there are two paths to wisdom: Quranic wisdom on one hand, and logic on the other. Critical analysis of Ibn al-Layth's writings strongly suggest that he was intimately familiar with the works of Aristotle; in particular, his short treatise Concerning Reason and the Revealed, he seems to strike a few Aristotelian notes, ultimately drawing the conclusion that logic is a parallel course in interpreting the world - in particular, he suggests that while God is the ultimate cause of all things, creation comes more as a set of divine laws than as direct interventions, and logic can be used to understand those laws.
While Ibn al-Layth is known more for his contributions to medical naturalism than Islamic logic, his thinking nevertheless represents an early example of the diverge of Islam in Saqlabid al-Andalus from that in Arabia and Mesopotamia. In the east, Arab and Persian intellectuals had begun to adopt the teachings of Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari in earnest; intellectuals such as Ibn al-Layth would begin to move in the opposite direction as more and more Muslim conversos began to move into the ranks of upper-class thinkers, bringing with them new takes on Islamic theology, some of them coloured by their negative experiences with rigorist sects.
The primary contribution of Ibn al-Layth comes from where his life experiences drew his study of medicine. Driven out of his home as he was by the blandishments of the Al-Mutahirin, Ibn al-Layth harboured more than a few doubts about the group's extreme theology, which emphasized a radical form of taharah - the Al-Mutahirin were known for their obsession with ritual purity, in particular extending their beliefs to a general conceit that non-Muslims, Alids[4] and even those they deemed to be insufficiently zealous in their devotion to God should be considered unclean and removed from the presence of the believers. This obsession with their own purity dictated the behaviour of the Al-Mutahirin upper class: They zealously segregated themselves from their subjects and heavily robed themselves when leaving their dwellings, and they tended to drive Christians, Jews and Alids out of cities and towns they captured, believing that all but the most deeply heartfelt conversion to Islam would leave the converso with an indelible taint upon their faith. The fixation led them as well towards extreme views on purity of belief; the group tended towards rather casually labeling any notable sinner a kafir.
Broadly speaking, the views of the Al-Mutahirin on purity stemmed from their incredibly rigid form of jurisprudence. The movement's leaders rejected qiyas as a path to enlightenment and considered anything beyond the Quran and the musings of the first generation of Muslims to be invalid and heretical as a source of knowledge. The sect considered innovation and heresy to be unforgivable sins and anyone who participated in them to be actively contributing to the destruction of Islam, and their jurisprudence was rooted in the ideal of purifying the faith of innovation and restoring it to the original, pure form of belief as embodied by the Prophet (PBUH).
For his part, Ibn al-Layth viewed the Al-Mutahirin's lead preacher, Badis ibn Yusuf, as cut from the same cloth as the Khawarij.[5] It is in the context of his contempt for Badis and his take on faith that Ibn al-Layth turned his medical knowledge to the task of testing Badis's premises concerning purification. The result of this work was his most well-known treatise, The Methods of Proof Concerning the Cleanliness of the Spirit and the Body. In some printings it is known by the more dramatic title The Filth of the Purists.
Ibn al-Layth's treatise is effectively twofold. The first and less naturalistically compelling segment of the document is a rigorous refutation of Badis based on Ibn al-Layth's formidable knowledge of fiqh, in which he comes to the conclusion that Badis and his followers are hypocrites acting upon a bid'ah[6] and damaging Islam even as they profess to be purifying it.
The second component of Methods of Proof is a purely medical document in which Ibn al-Layth details an extensive study of cleanliness, filth and its relation to the spread of sickness. In particular he conducted an analysis of the illnesses confronting common Andalusians at the Bimaristan of Qurtubah versus those facing the people he met at court in Qurtubah, who were less likely to come into contact with filth on a regular basis.
Ibn al-Layth's recommendations boil down to the earliest known treatise on sanitation and personal hygiene. Building on existing hadith which emphasize not bringing sick or unclean animals into the presence of other animals, Ibn al-Layth issues a series of recommendations concerning the proper disposal of human and animal waste and on supplementary body hygiene, expanding on various elements already enshrined in fiqh. In particular he expands on the types of water which may be considered impure by analyzing medical factors alongside spiritual ones, specifically excluding any water which has been in the presence of an unclean animal or a sick person, and makes recommendations around frequency of full bathing, complementary to jurisprudence concerning ablution. The document goes on to emphasize the importance of cleanliness, but suggests that purifying to excess - as in the case of Badis and his followers - will unbalance the body's humours and weaken the constitution.
Methods of Proof is considered one of the earliest medical texts clearly emphasizing the importance of hygiene, sanitation and cleanliness to the medical health of a community. The text seems to have circulated to some extent in Ibn al-Layth's lifetime, but certainly serves as an example of the key advantages in sanitation and personal cleanliness Andalusians enjoyed over most of Europe at the time, as well as an emphasis on the importance of a high standard of care for the body. It is also one of the first documents to hint at the role played in human and animal byproducts in the spread of epidemics.
While Ibn al-Layth's work would not immediately lead to improvements in civic sanitation, he also penned a series of treatises concerning other medical conditions. The most notable is his early identification of food debris as a cause of tooth decay, though he considered such food waste not so much the direct cause as a factor which allowed toothworms to proliferate. His Methods of Proof for the Care of the Mouth became the guiding text on ostial care[7] in much of the Muslim world, becoming widely referred to within his lifetime in Andalusia. In another text, he produced a startlingly complete anatomical study of the human skull.
Ibn al-Layth's work took some time to proliferate outside of Andalusia and the western Maghreb, encountering in particular the tendency of the Al-Mutahirins to consider him a Mu'tazilite and a kafir. His texts proliferated primarily through the Bimaristan established by Hisham II about a century before and circulated from there through the travels of visiting scholars and physicians.
Late in life, Ibn al-Layth served as a court physician at the expanded Alcazar in Qurtubah, but eventually was granted the right to retire, well after the rule of Wahb and Abdullah II. He returned to the port of Al-Jazirah and took up residence just outside the city, where he died a peaceful death while reading in his library. Today, the home thought to have once belonged to him is preserved as the Ibn al-Layth House National Museum and Library.
[1] Science.
[2] A scientific discipline is known ITTL as a nature.
[3] The Philosophers and the Prophets
[4] Shi'ites.
[5] Kharijites.
[6] An innovation - Ibn al-Layth basically makes the point that the purity trolls are going completely beyond the bounds of Islamic law and are thus committing an evil innovation.
[7] Oral hygiene.
Blushing a little, Iqal wove one hand into his hair and hunched his shoulders. "Tell me about it," he muttered, letting his eyes wander from shelf to shelf. The room itself was not the largest they'd visited during the trip - a fair-sized sitting room, but lined with old shelves, clearly painstakingly maintained over the years and bedecked with heavy tomes and codexes, some of them seeming to be older than time itself.
Perhaps less inspiring, but no less imposing, were the velvet-trimmed length of cord politely separating the students and their teacher from the shelves, as well as the signs exhorting them not to touch anything.
As the students browsed through the museum, Iqal found his gaze drifting towards his professor, only to start as he realized he wasn't the only one looking. Dr. Mirza chuckled simply and shook his head.
"You're hardly tainting the place," the professor assured. "You're in a house of learning, after all. Ibn al-Layth was probably used to having people coming to him to learn."
"Ah... yeah, maybe," Iqal conceded with a sheepish smile, gaze drifting through the room, towards a couple of roped-off chairs and an elegant table set nearby. Recreations, of course - the house had changed hands too many times over the years for things like that to survive.
"I wonder how they knew what kind of chair Ibn al-Layth was sitting in," the young man murmured with quiet wonder.
"They don't," conceded Dr. Mirza as he moved to stand beside the two students. "Part of studying history is a process of deductive reasoning and educated inference. The same goes for naturalism,[1] when you get right down to it. We may never objectively know what kind of chair Ibn al-Layth owned. But we can infer it based on what we do know about Andalusi furnishings and the means of the scholarly class during this period."
"Hold on," Feyik put in with a blink. "Since when do we know what furniture from a thousand years ago looked like?"
Dr. Mirza smiled pensively. "Surprisingly there have been chairs from centuries ago found. Things like tables. Stools. Other furnishings. They constructed things in those days as if you were investing in something truly luxurious. In fact, this period is something of the start of an age of inspiration."
Furrowing his brows, Iqal squinted at the chair for a moment, letting hiseyes travel the lines of it - bronze framing, elegant cushions in complex geometric patterns, workmanship like someone had slaved over it for decades just to get it right. It was the sort of thing you would never find at a furnisher's store these days.
"Why were people so inspired?" he asked. "I mean, to make... chairs. And to be Ibn al-Layth."
"Well," Dr. Mirza said with a tilt of his head, folding his arms. "We talk about the Rule of the Slaves sometimes just based on politics. But it was also a time when a lot of new avenues in high society were opening for indigenous Muslims in this part of the world. A lot more creative people had a lot more opportunities in those days. Skill and imagination were a lot more important."
Iqal nodded, taking stock of the chair again, then turning his gaze back to the books. Not for the first time, he wondered if someone of his bloodline had once wrought chairs like that, or written tomes like those, or sat in a library just like this one.
~
Excerpt: Falcons of Early Naturalism - Abdullah Ghazi, Naturalist Documentary Press, AD 1964
Ibn al-Layth (Abu' l-Hasan Aamir ibn Tariq ibn al-Layth)
AD 1033 (Tlemcen, Maghrib) --> AD 1114 (Al-Jazirah, Andalusiyya)
Of the great early naturalists associated with the cultural and intellectual flowering which took place during the period known as the Rule of the Slaves, Ibn al-Layth is considered among the most eminent. His contributions to naturalism came to exercise a great impact on the daily lives of Andalusians, and later on the broader Muslim world. The advances in medicine and personal cleanliness he pioneered made daily life better and healthier, once fully embraced.
Born in Maghrib during the reign of al-Muntasir, the son of a well-respected Berber family with a history of public service, Ibn al-Layth fled his hometown of Tlemcen in the 1060s during the early days of the rise of the Al-Mutahirin movement. He landed in the port of Al-Jazirah but soon traveled north to Qurtubah, where he pursued advanced studies in philosophy, theology and in particular the nature of medicine.[2] However, while he grew up in an atmosphere in which rigorist interpretations of the Quran ran rife, with the ultra-intense fixations of the Purists firmly in the background of his learning, Ibn al-Layth seems to have been nothing less than a skeptic's skeptic, approaching learning through a thoroughly non-mystical mindset.
Perhaps the most remarkable trait of Ibn al-Layth as a thinker was his conceit that logic and faith did not contradict each other. An admirer of classical learners, particularly the Greeks, he seems to have held a hope of demonstrating the greatness of Islam by proving the rightness of God and His works not only through faith, but through empirical logic utterly undeniable to any reasonable audience. In his early writings, Ibn al-Layth posits that there are two paths to wisdom: Quranic wisdom on one hand, and logic on the other. Critical analysis of Ibn al-Layth's writings strongly suggest that he was intimately familiar with the works of Aristotle; in particular, his short treatise Concerning Reason and the Revealed, he seems to strike a few Aristotelian notes, ultimately drawing the conclusion that logic is a parallel course in interpreting the world - in particular, he suggests that while God is the ultimate cause of all things, creation comes more as a set of divine laws than as direct interventions, and logic can be used to understand those laws.
While Ibn al-Layth is known more for his contributions to medical naturalism than Islamic logic, his thinking nevertheless represents an early example of the diverge of Islam in Saqlabid al-Andalus from that in Arabia and Mesopotamia. In the east, Arab and Persian intellectuals had begun to adopt the teachings of Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari in earnest; intellectuals such as Ibn al-Layth would begin to move in the opposite direction as more and more Muslim conversos began to move into the ranks of upper-class thinkers, bringing with them new takes on Islamic theology, some of them coloured by their negative experiences with rigorist sects.
The primary contribution of Ibn al-Layth comes from where his life experiences drew his study of medicine. Driven out of his home as he was by the blandishments of the Al-Mutahirin, Ibn al-Layth harboured more than a few doubts about the group's extreme theology, which emphasized a radical form of taharah - the Al-Mutahirin were known for their obsession with ritual purity, in particular extending their beliefs to a general conceit that non-Muslims, Alids[4] and even those they deemed to be insufficiently zealous in their devotion to God should be considered unclean and removed from the presence of the believers. This obsession with their own purity dictated the behaviour of the Al-Mutahirin upper class: They zealously segregated themselves from their subjects and heavily robed themselves when leaving their dwellings, and they tended to drive Christians, Jews and Alids out of cities and towns they captured, believing that all but the most deeply heartfelt conversion to Islam would leave the converso with an indelible taint upon their faith. The fixation led them as well towards extreme views on purity of belief; the group tended towards rather casually labeling any notable sinner a kafir.
Broadly speaking, the views of the Al-Mutahirin on purity stemmed from their incredibly rigid form of jurisprudence. The movement's leaders rejected qiyas as a path to enlightenment and considered anything beyond the Quran and the musings of the first generation of Muslims to be invalid and heretical as a source of knowledge. The sect considered innovation and heresy to be unforgivable sins and anyone who participated in them to be actively contributing to the destruction of Islam, and their jurisprudence was rooted in the ideal of purifying the faith of innovation and restoring it to the original, pure form of belief as embodied by the Prophet (PBUH).
For his part, Ibn al-Layth viewed the Al-Mutahirin's lead preacher, Badis ibn Yusuf, as cut from the same cloth as the Khawarij.[5] It is in the context of his contempt for Badis and his take on faith that Ibn al-Layth turned his medical knowledge to the task of testing Badis's premises concerning purification. The result of this work was his most well-known treatise, The Methods of Proof Concerning the Cleanliness of the Spirit and the Body. In some printings it is known by the more dramatic title The Filth of the Purists.
Ibn al-Layth's treatise is effectively twofold. The first and less naturalistically compelling segment of the document is a rigorous refutation of Badis based on Ibn al-Layth's formidable knowledge of fiqh, in which he comes to the conclusion that Badis and his followers are hypocrites acting upon a bid'ah[6] and damaging Islam even as they profess to be purifying it.
The second component of Methods of Proof is a purely medical document in which Ibn al-Layth details an extensive study of cleanliness, filth and its relation to the spread of sickness. In particular he conducted an analysis of the illnesses confronting common Andalusians at the Bimaristan of Qurtubah versus those facing the people he met at court in Qurtubah, who were less likely to come into contact with filth on a regular basis.
Ibn al-Layth's recommendations boil down to the earliest known treatise on sanitation and personal hygiene. Building on existing hadith which emphasize not bringing sick or unclean animals into the presence of other animals, Ibn al-Layth issues a series of recommendations concerning the proper disposal of human and animal waste and on supplementary body hygiene, expanding on various elements already enshrined in fiqh. In particular he expands on the types of water which may be considered impure by analyzing medical factors alongside spiritual ones, specifically excluding any water which has been in the presence of an unclean animal or a sick person, and makes recommendations around frequency of full bathing, complementary to jurisprudence concerning ablution. The document goes on to emphasize the importance of cleanliness, but suggests that purifying to excess - as in the case of Badis and his followers - will unbalance the body's humours and weaken the constitution.
Methods of Proof is considered one of the earliest medical texts clearly emphasizing the importance of hygiene, sanitation and cleanliness to the medical health of a community. The text seems to have circulated to some extent in Ibn al-Layth's lifetime, but certainly serves as an example of the key advantages in sanitation and personal cleanliness Andalusians enjoyed over most of Europe at the time, as well as an emphasis on the importance of a high standard of care for the body. It is also one of the first documents to hint at the role played in human and animal byproducts in the spread of epidemics.
While Ibn al-Layth's work would not immediately lead to improvements in civic sanitation, he also penned a series of treatises concerning other medical conditions. The most notable is his early identification of food debris as a cause of tooth decay, though he considered such food waste not so much the direct cause as a factor which allowed toothworms to proliferate. His Methods of Proof for the Care of the Mouth became the guiding text on ostial care[7] in much of the Muslim world, becoming widely referred to within his lifetime in Andalusia. In another text, he produced a startlingly complete anatomical study of the human skull.
Ibn al-Layth's work took some time to proliferate outside of Andalusia and the western Maghreb, encountering in particular the tendency of the Al-Mutahirins to consider him a Mu'tazilite and a kafir. His texts proliferated primarily through the Bimaristan established by Hisham II about a century before and circulated from there through the travels of visiting scholars and physicians.
Late in life, Ibn al-Layth served as a court physician at the expanded Alcazar in Qurtubah, but eventually was granted the right to retire, well after the rule of Wahb and Abdullah II. He returned to the port of Al-Jazirah and took up residence just outside the city, where he died a peaceful death while reading in his library. Today, the home thought to have once belonged to him is preserved as the Ibn al-Layth House National Museum and Library.
[1] Science.
[2] A scientific discipline is known ITTL as a nature.
[3] The Philosophers and the Prophets
[4] Shi'ites.
[5] Kharijites.
[6] An innovation - Ibn al-Layth basically makes the point that the purity trolls are going completely beyond the bounds of Islamic law and are thus committing an evil innovation.
[7] Oral hygiene.
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I have been putting-off reading this TL for months due to other reasons, but I finally had the chance to (silently) read this over the past week or so. Consider me subscribed. 
As for the latest installment, I wonder if al-Layth's scholarly works will filter north to the squabbling kingdoms of Christian Iberia. If nothing else, it might just save more lives from being pointlessly lost (as much as they were from all the Norman wars.)
P.S: I'm also waiting for your take on New World colonization. I find it really serendipitous that you and A Moorish America are/will be tackling the same subject. I thought an Islamic New World TL died with Minarets of Atlantis! (oh how I still miss you...)
As for the latest installment, I wonder if al-Layth's scholarly works will filter north to the squabbling kingdoms of Christian Iberia. If nothing else, it might just save more lives from being pointlessly lost (as much as they were from all the Norman wars.)
P.S: I'm also waiting for your take on New World colonization. I find it really serendipitous that you and A Moorish America are/will be tackling the same subject. I thought an Islamic New World TL died with Minarets of Atlantis! (oh how I still miss you...)
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Planet of Hats
Donor
There might be some mitigation based on how a hypothetical ITTL al-Andalus would handle contact, but what happened here is a spinoff from Hisham and al-Mughira's reign. One of Hisham's deeds was to open a big medical school and hospital in Córdoba. The result is that the already considerable intellectual heft present in Andalusia at the time (there was a lot of great scholarship done during the Almoravid period, for ex) has been bolstered over seven decades by having this big academy in there as a place to cross-pollinate thought and spread best practice. I would certainly expect medical science in ITTL al-Andalus to begin to pull ahead of OTL.
As for the New World, the Andalusians right now lack the zeal of the Conquistadores and are generally smarter and more advanced. But it's also the late 11th century, going into the 12th, and al-Andalus presently has no need for a naval infrastructure capable of reaching the New World. They have good ships - Denia is just full of early qarib-style ships right now, probably equipped with the lateen given that the Arabs seem to have used it long before Christian Europe outside the ERE did - but their primary trade route into the Western Sudan is not naval, it's overland. That is, it's the trans-Saharan route complex that connects Awdaghosh and Timbuktu to Sijilmasa and result in gold and slaves moving north and salt moving south. Also, the main port is in fact Denia; their trade is inward-facing and aimed at exporting and importing throughout the Mediterranean. If Andalusia is going to get to the New World, they'll need reason to get good ships in the water in the Atlantic, not just in the Med.
Also worth noting that no amount of brushing your teeth is going to give Aztecs immunity to smallpox.
Bath time boys, will them baths save them from the inevitable pandemic that will rise? Who knows. Almohads probably did believe they were in 40k chaos in the north (christians) orks in the rest of north africa the elder in levant and Egypt.
You have a simple reason for conquring america its the land of shaytan you don't have to be zealous to fight the shaytan and any leader will have strong pressure to conquer and convert they have everything islam hates sun worshipping, human sacrifice and people who are part gods or a gods also multiple gods.
Also divergence in islam could be a good reason for going west, abbasids won't like it and the fatimids can cut trade with the west to destabilise mahgrab and andalusia if they want to expand or to just annoy sunnis.
What dynasty rules china? So far planets has ignored china and somewhere he did read about the jurchen also gunpowder, trade routes may fall? Causing andalusia to look for new routes maybe?
You have a simple reason for conquring america its the land of shaytan you don't have to be zealous to fight the shaytan and any leader will have strong pressure to conquer and convert they have everything islam hates sun worshipping, human sacrifice and people who are part gods or a gods also multiple gods.
Also divergence in islam could be a good reason for going west, abbasids won't like it and the fatimids can cut trade with the west to destabilise mahgrab and andalusia if they want to expand or to just annoy sunnis.
What dynasty rules china? So far planets has ignored china and somewhere he did read about the jurchen also gunpowder, trade routes may fall? Causing andalusia to look for new routes maybe?
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Planet of Hats
Donor
Glorious Zhongguo is currently at the height of the Song Dynasty, as you might expect from OTL. If al-Andalus is ahead technologically of most of Europe, the Song are ahead technologically of most of Earth. They have early gunpowder weapons, movable type printing and a truly ridiculous level of iron and steel production for an 11th-century nation, for which they're just beginning to apply the use of coal. Politically they've had more than a few problems with the Khitan Liao Dynasty to their north but have settled into an uneasy stalemate after the breakdown of the Shanyuan Treaty sometime around the middle of this century. The Liao did get a bunch of money out of them over a couple of decades, and the Song military is still structurally a bit squishy, but they're a bit of a tougher nut to crack than they were OTL. There's still some tension over the Sixteen Prefectures but the Liao are presently a bit distracted with feuding among their vassals - Korea's giving them a bit of grief, and there's unrest among the Sibe people who live under the Khitan umbrella.
As the butterflies have filtered down the Silk Road from the less-than-Seljuky disruptions created by the arrival of the Yuregir Turkmens, there've been minor tweaks across the region, including the Western Xia having a slightly worse go of it: Li Deming was still born, but died a few years earlier and before being able to finalize the campaign against the Ganzhou Uyghurs, who continue to hang on. The Western Xia are somewhat smaller and less dangerous, and the rump Uyghurs continue to get periodically raided and pestered by various steppe peoples, among them the Naimans. There's a general sense that the Uyghurs are on a slide and the Xia could belatedly move into the void.
Basically things are a little more tense for the Song, but they're seeing some benefits from it, and thus far nothing's come to kick them in the teeth and put a damper on their long arc of technological progress.
Planet of Hats
Donor
Denia has the advantage of being a key power centre of the Saqaliba, who favour it for parochial reasons. Even OTL, Denia was a taifa on its own and actually controlled Cartagena. Half the fun of Denia is that it was a naval taifa and had enough projection ability not just to conduct rampant piracy, but to invade Sardinia. But it also had a significant commercial fleet.
ITTL, Denia's prosperity is a natural outgrowth of what happened to it OTL.
Planet of Hats
Donor
In the north of India, the Ghaznavids punted the last of the Pratiharas out of Kannauj roughly on schedule. The lack of Seljuks - the Yuregir went straight through Tabaristan, and the Kizik Turkmens didn't have much of a sweep into the central Asian mountains - has resulted in the Ghaznavids staying stronger for longer. The expanding Turkmens of Daylam eventually did take a bunch of land in Persia and Khorasan off the hands of the sons of Mahmud II, and the realm experienced a brief civil war between the two lads, in which his second son, Majdud, won out. Majdud didn't last more than a few years before being overthrown by his cousin, who took the throne as Abd ar-Rahman with the backing of Karluk ghilman. While Esfahan was lost to the Turkmens, Abd ar-Rahman continues to run the show from Ghazna and seems to be a fairly competent and steady leader who has done well to enforce his will on the petty kinglets of the northern part of the subcontinent. A few non-Muslim tributaries in the mountains have slipped his grasp recently, and the north outside of the Ghaznavid areas tends to be a disconnected sequence of statelets ruled by petty rajas. For now, the Muslim presence in northern India remains a thing with some actual cachet, and the Ghaznavids still have some clout to them.
In the south, the POD didn't wipe out the expansive Cholas, who showed up on schedule until about the 1040s. The first son of Rajendra Chola I - RC, incidentally, got in just before the butterflies arrived -turned out to be more judicious about which battlefields he stood on than his OTL counterpart, with the result that the Cholas had a little more stability as they tromped along the east coast and asserted themselves in places like Sumatra. One notable butterfly here is that the increased stability looks like it'll result in the Cholas hanging on to Sri Lanka than they did OTL. The predictable fighting with the Chalukyas is also a thing.
Not much has changed in the lands of the Khmer, meanwhile.
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Googling Glorious Zhongguo comes up with china ball, is this a original emperor?
Should i give up on the jurchen thing you read and teased?
Should i give up on the jurchen thing you read and teased?
Planet of Hats
Donor
"Glorious Zhongguo" is just a poetic way of referring to China.
Don't give up on the Jurchens yet. They're coming. Eventually.
