AHC: Islam Fails

The Tang Chinese will have alot more influence on central asia, creating a very interesting world, the Chinese might even go to Afghanistan and the black sea.

It would be interesting to see Afghanistan and Swat Valley continue being a stronghold for Buddhism. It would also signifigantly change the characteristics of the tribes in the area ecspecially the dominating Pashtun.

I also can see Manichaeism persisting in the Middle East to continue being the faith of merchants help abridge an area of many religions, languages and cultures.
 
The Tang Chinese will have alot more influence on central asia, creating a very interesting world, the Chinese might even go to Afghanistan and the black sea.

Afghanistan would probably give them some extreme trouble, its just near unconquerable due to geography. They would be fighting for centuries before they could pacify the tribes entirely, it would be like their attempts to conquer mongolia which usially failed due to the sheer investment needed to break the tribes.
 
Afghanistan would probably give them some extreme trouble, its just near unconquerable due to geography. They would be fighting for centuries before they could pacify the tribes entirely, it would be like their attempts to conquer mongolia which usially failed due to the sheer investment needed to break the tribes.

yeah look at whats happening now..

but Persia could be a cultural battle ground between Byzantium and the far east
 
The war between Persia and the ERE had already reached equilibrium. Just like the ERE couldn't expand into Mesopotamia for fear of counter from the Iranian plateau, so couldn't the Persian's expand beyond the Mediterranean coast, because they completely lacked a navy. Not to mention the fact that the ERE had no great opponents on its western borders, unlike Persia who had powerful, continuous steppe nomads to contend with in between wars with the ERE.
 
What would be the most likely Christian sect to dominate Arabia: Nestorianism or Orthodoxy?

Probably neither: Ghassanids and Lakhmids were both Monophysites, and so were Yemen's Christians through Ethiopian influence. A can see a large Monophysite region stretching from Syria and Armenia to Somalia and from Egypt to the Tigris, possibly unified by an Arabic dominant group for while. Aramaic, in the Syriac form, is likely to stay the main cultural language of most of this area (excluding Egypt) for much longer, though slowly fading into an increasingly Arabicized spoken language.
No Islam=no Arabic language as we know it.
 
Probably neither: Ghassanids and Lakhmids were both Monophysites, and so were Yemen's Christians through Ethiopian influence. A can see a large Monophysite region stretching from Syria and Armenia to Somalia and from Egypt to the Tigris, possibly unified by an Arabic dominant group for while. Aramaic, in the Syriac form, is likely to stay the main cultural language of most of this area (excluding Egypt) for much longer, though slowly fading into an increasingly Arabicized spoken language.
No Islam=no Arabic language as we know it.

Arabic DID exist sibnce long, it just would be a national-regional language, max.
 
Arabic DID exist sibnce long, it just would be a national-regional language, max.

Well, bad wording on my part for brevity's sake. Yes, Arabic existed (its earliest attested inscription is dated 328AD, iirc), but its subsequent evolution without Islam as a written language would be way different; the grammatical codification of the Qur'anic phase, that provided the basis for Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, would not occur at all or be completely unrecognizable, substrate and adstrate influence on the spoken variants would change completely, and so on.
So, well, probably some form of Arabic would exist, and probably would exist as a written language to some extent at least. It is not likely that it would be a significant cultural language anywhere, and if so, it would be deeply changed in lexicon and probably, to some extent, grammar. There is no warrant that the pre-islamic poetry of that time will be preserved (and surely it wouldn't in an identical form, for obvious transmission matters). The time immediately preceding and following the Prophet's life was a key moment in the linguistic and literary canonization; the corpus of what is considered "arabic" OTL formed then.
A change there would impact heavily subsequent evolution.
 
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