AHC: Muhammad has no living descendants:

[Snake Featherston]

The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have the rise of the Ummayyads be concurrent with Muhammad leaving no living descendants ala Ali and Hussein. Without living descendants, how does Islam develop in terms of challenges to the Caliphate, as such challenges will inevitably develop with this being the nature of empires? What replaces Shia Islam as the Islamic version of mysticism? Personally as I see it the most likely replacement of Shia Islam would be the emergence of a different version of the concept of the Mahdi, increasing Islam's resemblance to Judaism in some crucial aspects, while the absence of Shia Islam might also lead to the emergence of a native Muslim concept of monarchy, which IIRC emerged more in practice than theory under Sunni rulers.

 

[WhatIsAUserName]

Wouldn't this be as simple as Muhammad having no children, or at the very least, no grandchildren?

Well, Muhammad might not leave descendants, but people are still going to claim him as family. For example, Ali wasn't a descendant of Muhammad, but a cousin. I could imagine people still claiming kinship from relatives or in-laws of Muhammad, like Hamza, Abbas, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali, etc as they did historically.

 

[Kosta]

The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have the rise of the Ummayyads be concurrent with Muhammad leaving no living descendants ala Ali and Hussein. Without living descendants, how does Islam develop in terms of challenges to the Caliphate, as such challenges will inevitably develop with this being the nature of empires? What replaces Shia Islam as the Islamic version of mysticism? Personally as I see it the most likely replacement of Shia Islam would be the emergence of a different version of the concept of the Mahdi, increasing Islam's resemblance to Judaism in some crucial aspects, while the absence of Shia Islam might also lead to the emergence of a native Muslim concept of monarchy, which IIRC emerged more in practice than theory under Sunni rulers.

Ibadi Islam could fill the void that a nonexistent Shi'a Islam would leave behind.

 

[MarshalBraginsky]

I did make a thread, asking on what would the development of Islam be like if Abu Bakr or Ali died before Muhammad himself. Does it butterfly the era of the Four Rightful Caliphs, thereby also butterflying away the Sunni-Shia divide?

 

[OS fan]

This is an interesting idea. I wonder whether it could lead to a quasi-democratic Islamic empire. The time was ready - literacy had spread, and a middle class was developing. The situation was somewhat similar to England under Cromwell.

 

[Blaze86420]

As already mentioned, Ali was still Muhammad's cousin and part of the Islamic community would have backed his claim regardless.