AHC/WI: Age of Enlightenment takes place in the Middle East simultaneously with Europe

Albert.Nik

Banned
In this AHC,the challenge you have is to have an Age of Enlightenment as it happened in Christian Europe starting from the 17th century in the Middle Eastern Islamic lands too. My range is from Anatolia to Persia to Central Asia till where Islam is dominant. Age of Enlightenment is a time when Secularism and Pure Rational philosophies developed and came to rule. Subsequently,it led to Democracies being dominant in the Western World and Human rights rising to new heights compared to the rest of the World. How would this affect various developments of that age to this day? How different would the Middle East look? How would the colonial era look like? How would this affect the developments of Science,modern Nations,etc in all parts of the globe? You can go as behind as you want for a POD,no limits on that. Ethnicity Demographic changes should be limited within 15% of OTL but timelines involving conquests are allowed if this 15% condition is satisfied.
Now what is not allowed in this thread is:
Slandering other cultures,nations,religions and people.
Contempt towards any people,religion or culture.
Unnecessarily slandering Christianity or Judaism or Islam(criticize some aspects of you want but no slandering).
Slandering or abusing people of any region,be it Europe or ME or their descendants.
Slandering Secularism,Atheism,Agnosticism and Deism.
Slandering Rationalism and Science values from a religious or a cultural viewpoint.
Slandering Human rights.
Arguments and debates should be gentle and don't use any strong language against anyone.
 
The ideas were there, they just needed some oomph behind them.

Of the top of my head, Shiek Bedreddin launching a succesful revolt against the Ottomans is a good starting point, having democracy be an essential part of the region's identity and religous tolerance more codified.
 
Age of Enlightenment is a time when Secularism and Pure Rational philosophies developed and came to rule. Subsequently,it led to Democracies being dominant in the Western World and Human rights rising to new heights compared to the rest of the World.

The premise, as written, seems to be somewhat of a stretch.

These philosophies became popular in the XVIII century but they did not came to rule because the whole "age" was heavily based upon an idea of Enlightened Absolutism and these monarchs (Old Fritz, Catherine II, Joseph II) tended to separate theories from the practices and the same philosophers who preached the advanced ideas had been OK with the situation. More than that, at least some of them had been considering Enlightened Absolutism as a tool for implementing their ideas which seems more than a little bit along the lines of "herding people into Paradise with a stick".

Age of Enlightenment ended in 1789. "Democracies" did not become dominant in the Western World until after WWI, more than a century later, and hardly can be directly linked to this period. One of the few immediate by-products of that "age" in a country most influenced by its ideas, France, was Revolution which declared all these nice things on a paper just to immediately disregard them and to descend into the Rule of the Terror and aggressive wars with return, within few years, to the monarchy/empire.

The US Revolution was, indeed, different but Bolivar, while motivated by the same ideas, was much less successful in establishing the democratic model in South America and the same goes for Mexico.

OTOH, the constitutional monarchies and republics are also predating the XVII century (International historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution, while the French count it from 1715, after the death of Louis XIV). England and Venice aside, the PLC was created in 1569 (and separate Polish and Lithuanian Sejms existed well before that), Riksdag in Sweden officially exists since 1527, Tagsatzung of Swiss Confederation exists since 1500, etc.

The "human rights" is a tricky issue outside a purely legal aspect of it: the European states of the XIX and even some of the XVIII (IIRC, the Old Fritz lost a lawsuit to a farmer which land he "appropriated" and Maria-Theresa had to pay a garden-owner for the fruits her husband stole for her; she even ordered to install a plaque on a place where he climbed over the garden wall ;)) tended to have laws providing some degree of a personal protection (which was putting them ahead of the "uncivilized world") but this was a far cry from the modern meaning of the term (which is, again, has very wide interpretations). Some of these ideas existed, at least as being codified in the laws, well before the Age of Enlightenment and could not be contributed to it. For example, in England trial by jury existed at least since the Anglo-Saxon times (legal code of Æthelred the Unready).
 
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