WI Incel rebellion happens in the Abbasid Caliphate

yoyo

Banned
With any POD, have an incel rebellion emerge in the abbasid caliphate due to chronic shortage of women due to polygamy.
 
Possibly the funniest idea for a tl maybe ever.


Modern Saudis describing extremists in their borders

"Not Kharijites, a far older and deadlier threat, Incels"
 
For a sorta serious answer, I seem to recall that it was only the privileged who regularly practiced polygamy, so the masses usually were monogamous. A possible PoD, then, is an expansion of the wealthy classes/means to support polygamy so that there are fewer women to go around.
 
For a sorta serious answer, I seem to recall that it was only the privileged who regularly practiced polygamy, so the masses usually were monogamous. A possible PoD, then, is an expansion of the wealthy classes/means to support polygamy so that there are fewer women to go around.
Numbers wouldn't add up.

Why not get more slaves???
 
Numbers wouldn't add up.

Why not get more slaves???

What if they were restricted from being able to obtain more slaves by more powerful foes around them?

Since the OP specified the Abbasids, it could be a rival Islamic state in Yemen/Oman on one side and the Byzzies on the other.
 

yoyo

Banned
There was actually a chronic shortage of women in Late Imperial China, and it's scholarly consensus that this was one of the social problems that led to the fall of the Ming.
So the manchus invaded china to shut down chinese incel rebellion. The shun dynasty was an incel dynasty? Was zhang xianzhong an actual incel?
 

Deleted member 114175

Well, extreme sexism was already prevalent in most societies at that time. Many pre-modern wars involved abduction of women especially on frontiers between rival civilizations, or between different ways of life (sedentary agrarians vs pastoralists vs hunter-gatherers competing over the same land).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The shun dynasty was an incel dynasty? Was zhang xianzhong an actual incel?
Not quite, but much of the rebel armies, especially in the early stages of the rebellions, were composed of poor, young, wifeless men (called guanggun, "bare branches", in Chinese). Because they lacked family ties and the mainstream of Chinese society did not have much place for secular unmarried men, the guanggun had little choice but to join wandering groups of male vagrants—and because the Chinese state disapproved of these groups, seeing them (perhaps correctly) as little more than bands of marauding rapists, rioters, and would-be rebels, it cracked down harshly on them. This made the guanggun class of frustrated young men perhaps the easiest demographic to mobilize against the state.

Chinese policy makers were apparently unwilling to face the fact that the issue would not fix itself without righting Late Imperial China's ridiculous sex ratio (estimated at about 120 men per 100 women) by banning female infanticide and polygamy and instead spent administrative resources fighting the symptoms (the guanggun bands) as well as it could.
 
Eunuchs are incels by definition, and they occupied some pretty high positions in the Caliphate.

So they'd have a reasonable chance at succeeding and exiling all the Chads to Chad.
 
Eunuchs are incels by definition, and they occupied some pretty high positions in the Caliphate.

So they'd have a reasonable chance at succeeding and exiling all the Chads to Chad.

So, kinda like a proto-Mamluk Sultanate, with the state being run by people who are technically slaves?
 
that would be rather difficult as polygamy in the Qur'an is basically a mechanism to do the exact opposite: ensure all women, at a time when they had very little financial independence of their own, were provided for somehow (the dowry being given to the bride upon divorce was another part of this)

and as already mentioned, polygamy was mostly a practice of the nobility, and the Qur'an *does* imply one should take one wife instead of multiple
 
IIRC, there was a theory that monogamy arose as an arrangement whereby rich men agreed to limit themselves to one wife, and poor men agreed not to chop their heads off.
 
Top