middle east

The Safavid empire was the last Persian state to rule Iraq/Mesopotamia, whose history was linked with Iran's for centuries. Their rule over it was relatively short, however, and they lost control of the region to the Ottoman Empire during the 1530s. They briefly reconquered it during the reign...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were a few attempts by European Christians to settle in the Holy Land or Palestine, whether by the initiative of religious sects such as the German Templer Society or through settlement organizations such as The German Association of...

Fair warning, my knowledge of this subject is fairly limited. While the overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh is seen primarily as an American operation, the country whose government was most invested in his demise was actually Great Britain - the main target of Mossadegh's...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peres%E2%80%93Hussein_London_Agreement Shimon Peres, then foreign minister of Israel, held a secret meeting with king Hussein of Jordan in London, in April 11 1987. The subject of the discussion was the possible return of the West Bank, or at least most of it, to...

The son of a Seljuk prince who lost a dispute for the throne, Suleiman ibn Qutalmish took advantage of the civil wars that engulfed the Byzantine Empire after the Battle of Manzikert to take over most of Anatolia during the 1070s, laying the foundations of a new state, the Sultanate of Rum...

For a bit of context, while thinking of some ideas of how to make the Solar Power Satellite program of the 1970s plausible, I figured that it would require the 1970s-era fears of the future to come true, to some extent. It was an idea born out of the energy crisis, of the dual shocks of the 1973...

After centuries of decline and subjugation at the hands of foreign powers like the Buyids and the Seljuk Turks, the Abbasid Caliphate took advantage of the latter's decline in the 12th century to reassert its independence, forming a state in what is now Iraq. This resurgence came to an end...

Without reaching ASB territory, what other territories could Israel have conquered in 1948? All of Gaza? The old city of Jerusalem? The ruins of Gush Etzion? Could they have conquered more territories in Judea and Samaria?

Suppose that Parthia manages to finish off the moribund Seleucids before Rome does. They were on the verge of doing so during the reign of Phraates II, but his plans were shelved by a major crisis on their empire's eastern border: nomads from Central Asia launched raids deep into Parthian...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeian%E2%80%93Parthian_invasion_of_40_BC As the ailing Roman Republic convulsed in a series of civil wars that would eventually lead to its dissolution, the Parthian Empire, backed by a rebellious Roman general named Quintus Labienus, invaded Syria and occupied...

Alert: awfully generic information incoming. Before the outbreak of its civil war in 1975, Lebanon was a relatively prosperous country, whose capital, Beirut, was known as the "Paris of the Middle East". All that prosperity went down the drain after 15 years of infighting between more armed...

I was reading about these extinct Shia sects, could any of them have survived or grown as larger movements? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_Shia_sects

Problems with Damascus: The Umayyads chose Damascus as their capital, but while it's a good, centrally located Levantine capital, it seems to me to be a poor capital for a Caliphate stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus. Firstly Damascus is quite isolated. Landlocked with no Navigable...

173 CE - I’ve been doing a project for a while now on What if Rome Never Rose? And I’ve kinda developed a scenario out where a Parthian-Ptolemaic rivalry develops. However now I’m at a pivotal point where a foreign conqueror from Arabia known as Idil ‘The Conqueror’ has now rose to change Arabia...

Like it says on the tin. At the height of his power, between 1833 and 1841, Muhammad Ali Pasha controlled a state made up of Egypt, Sudan, Syria and the Hejaz that was independent from its nominal Ottoman overlord in all but name. However, his empire was destroyed as a result of the Oriental...

In 2005, Israel evacuated the 8,000 Jews who lived in the Gaza Strip and left. What if it didn't happen? What would the situation look like today? I think the situation will be better

I'm interested in your opinions here. I found that butterflying the crisis of XIV century is the best option to a surviving Byzantium. (as i have write to another thread i cannot citate, because I'm in phone). My problem is, i'm not sure what happen in Europa without the ottoman empire. In the...

In 1973, the Arab oil boycott broke out against the Western countries, and actually resulted in damage to Israel's foreign relations. What would have happened in a different reality, where the Arab oil boycott would have resulted in a real breakthrough in renewable energies? Two weeks after his...

ב-1973 פרץ חרם הנפט הערבי נגד מדינות המערב, והביא למעשה לפגיעה ביחסי החוץ של ישראל. מה היה קורה במציאות אחרת, שבה חרם הנפט הערבי היה מביא לפריצת דרך אמיתית באנרגיות מתחדשות? שבועיים לאחר בחירתו לנשיאות, הנשיא ג'רלד פורד מכריז שאסור לארה"ב ולמדינות המערב לסמוך על הנפט הערבי, וכי יש לפעול הן...

The first Turkish prime minister not to belong to the until then dominant Republican People's Party, Adnan Menderes ruled Turkey from 1950 until his removal by a military coup in May 27 1960, after which he was executed a year later. As time went on and the economy began to decline roughly...