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  1. Religion of God: A Din-i Ilahi Timeline

    @Madhukar_Shah is correct. The dīn-i ilāhī was not a religion, it was an eccentric attempt by Akbar to replicate the sort of sacred Sufi kingship that the Safavids had accomplished in Iran. The current edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam, the greatest historical reference book of the Islamic...

  2. "Certain accursed ones of no significance": What if Mehmed the Conqueror converts to Hurufism?

    Hurufism was a fifteenth-century Iranian kabbalistic sect which held (among other things) that the cosmos was literally a book written in the Language of God, of which Persian was the closest human language, and that their founder Fazlallah Astarabadi had been granted the divine inspiration to...

  3. AHC: Henotheistic Islam

    Javanese Islam IOTL had/has a highly developed cosmology that integrates indigenous divinities, as I mentioned. If you want something closer to the Islamic heartland, the Ahl-i Haqq in western Iran sometimes consider themselves Shi'a Muslims, and they worship a large number of Zoroastrian-ish...

  4. Akbar Mughal adopts Janissary, Timariot, Cage systems

    It would have calamitous effects because the Mughal state was far, far more dependent on non-Muslim elites than the Ottomans were on Christian ones.

  5. AHC: Henotheistic Islam

    Depending on your definition, this is already OTL, especially on the fringes of the Islamic world but sometimes even in the heartland. To quote the Encyclopaedia of Islam's entry on the Goddess of the Southern Ocean, a major spiritual figure in traditional Javanese Islam: And coming from a...

  6. What if the Islamic golden age of science had continued?

    Twelver Shiism has a fundamentally Mu’tazilite/rationalist theology. This does not appear to have made Safavid Persia a center of scientific innovation. Edit: The pop-history understanding of the impact of Mu’tazilism is pretty strange and I have no idea where it comes from. Maybe CK2?

  7. Ali-id dynasty replaces Umayyad califate during the Third Fitna

    The Abbasids were themselves initially a Shi’ite-aligned movement, being legitimized by the notion that they had received the Imamate from Ali’s grandson Abu Hashim and calling their claimant “the acceptable one from the house of Muhammad” so as to win pro-Alid support. So to a certain extent...

  8. Ancient AH speculation

    Depends on how extensive a discussion you want… but is this not alternative history from the mouth of Confucius himself? 微管仲，吾其被髮左衽矣。 Without Guan Zhong [controversial statesman of the seventh century BC], we would wear our hair loose and fasten our buttons to the left [the stereotypical...

  9. WI/AHC: Jiang Qing’s trilateral Confucian state becomes the system of government in China

    Jiang Qing (unfortunately pronounced similarly to Mao’s infamous wife) is a decently well-known Confucian thinker in the modern PRC, who has some radical ideas for a Chinese government more rooted in tradition. To quote a NYT editorial by Jiang: In modern China, Humane Authority should be...

  10. WI: The printing press is invented in Europe a hundred years earlier?

    What if the printing press was invented in Europe in the fourteenth century, not the fifteenth? Obviously this depends on how important you think the printing press alone was as an agent of change and innovation, but what impact would it have had on the Renaissance? Would the Reformation be...

  11. WI Indian Buddhism survived?

    I would say it’s a mix of both Brahmanic reform and Buddhist detachment from the laity; both were necessary for the downfall of Buddhism. Jainism was never as detached from lay believers as Buddhism ultimately became, and hence survived the emergence of what we now call Hinduism. The Theravada...

  12. WI Indian Buddhism survived?

    Indian Buddhism began to decline when the monastic community became increasingly isolated from the laity in the mid- to late first millennium, ceding ground to Hindu and Jain groups who appealed much more to lay communities. By the time of the Turko-Islamic invasions in the twelfth and...

  13. How long could Kush/Nubia stay pagan?

    Wikipedia actually distorts what Adam says in p. 440. I checked the original source, and he is talking about the Blemmyes, not Makuria.

  14. How long could Kush/Nubia stay pagan?

    Indeed. Solange Ashby says in a recent publication (Calling Out to Isis):

  15. How long could Kush/Nubia stay pagan?

    The conversion of the Nubians to Christianity in the sixth century was fairly easy because the Nobadians and other Nubian groups, who had overrun the old Egyptianized kingdom of Kush, for some reason chose not to patronize the old Egyptian-Kushite royal religion of Isis and Osiris. This was also...

  16. Could Timur have conquered North China?

    By 1405 this was not the case for a long time, and the economic center of gravity in China had shifted definitely towards the south.

  17. Could Timur have conquered North China?

    In 1405, Timur—the last great nomadic conqueror—died on the way to his last campaign, that of restoring Mongol rule in China. His armies were largely unbeaten on the field, having devastated western Eurasia from Russia to Delhi. He also had as his client Bunyashiri, a legitimate Toluid prince...

  18. Developing an Asian-American slave language

    To be frank this isn't how creoles work. Creoles aren't a hodgepodge of random words from different languages combined willy-nilly. Instead, the vast majority of their vocabulary (other than the odd cultural terms, like the names of a few--not all!--Vodou deities) derives from a lexifier, which...

  19. WI: The Inca Plan went through and the Incas were crowned Kings of Argentina?

    What if the Inca Plan went through, and Colonel Dionisio Inca Yupanqui was crowned constitutional King of Argentina?

  20. AHD/AHQ: The lifespan of empires-dynasties

    No, a five-hundred-year cycle is quite unusual in world history. In the past two thousand years of Chinese history, certainly since the Tang reunification, we regularly see a roughly two- or three-century cycle of regime change (the "dynastic cycle"): 618–875: Tang empire, the An-Shi rebellion...
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