Greetings and salutations.
It’s been a while since I last put up a map, so here’s one: it’s from a TL, based on an old soc.history.what-if thread, in which the Islamic world developed science and it’s own form of “modernity” while Christian Europe didn’t. The Americas speak Arabic and some Berber, except for West-African colonized N. Brazil and Danish Markland (too poor and cold to bother taking: New England is only thinly settled in this TL).
Al-Andalus a.k.a. the Caliphate of Cordoba dominates the history of this TL even more than the British Empire does in ours: most of it’s former colonies have become independent, but several states either remain closely tied to it or have entered into close association for fear of powerful neighbors.
Europe is rather backward, having missed out on the Renaissance and the scientific revolution: it had a reformation of sorts, but the national churches that replaced the Catholic church are by an large rather conservative and hostile to modernity in it’s Islam-flavored form. Poland is a nastily authoritarian state (think Saddam’s Iraq) and the Caliphate has already had to intervene militarily to prevent their development of atomic weapons, to prevent an outright occupation of the place by the Turks. France’s shaky monarchy is threatened by extremist elements, and the Anglo-Dutch monarchy has modernized about as successfully as our TL’s Turkey. Christian terrorism is a big problem in Italy, where more than a third of the population is still Christian (they form an absolute majority in large parts of the north). On the positive side, the present independent Christian states largely avoided direct colonization, although the Germanies were briefly a Turkish vassal and the Caliphate briefly occupied half of Francia in the 19th century and early 20th.
The Turkish Unity follows a supposedly rationalist totalitarian ideology developed by an Egyptian scholar: it’s somewhat less economically idiotic than OTL communism, but not much less repressive politically. The Ukraine and S. Russia have been heavily Islamicized and turkified. Since the last big war, it has been in occupation of western Persia: the eastern half survives thanks to support from the Caliphate, the Bengali Sultanate, and the north Americans (relatively a somewhat less powerful state than the OTL US: less centralized, and less densely populated in the north).
India is a bit on the backward side by the standards of Arabs, Turks, or Persians: think Latin America OTL. In the disruptions of the last war, several large areas suffered from successful revolts of the Hindu population: the Islamic states have reconsolidated their position, but the desire for a free and united Hindustan remains. Most people expect war will break out in the area again soon.
Africa was never fully colonized, and is mostly Muslim by now, although there are still large pagan populations in some of the inland states. Japan and Indonesia fought a 20-year war to divide East Asia between themselves: Japan, which is somewhat of an outsider in this TL as the one great non-Islamic power, has an “alliance of convenience” with the Turks.
Although the level of technology is generally a bit higher than OTL, it’s generally less secular, even in the modern Muslim lands. Jews are generally more tolerated in the Islamic world than Christians, although something of a “glass ceiling” remains for them. Atomic weapons, developed on a slow-track by Andalusian scientists to deter Turkish expansion, have been kept limited in numbers by treaties and inspection regimes, but all of the Big Powers still have hundreds of the damn things.
The Caliph in Cordova has not had much real power since the middle ages, [1] but he’s still the theoretical leader of Islam worldwide (something the Peruvian regime, the wacky heretical Dominion (think Muslim Mormons. In the jungle) and the rather secular north Americans don’t really put much stock in).
Best,
Bruce
[1] Our middle ages, of course: historians of this TL don’t classify things the same way…
