Neo-Zoroastran Mohammad? Roman and Persian Empires?

I've been working on my main OTL, The Gospel According to Hiawatha, in which Jesus is born to the Iroquois and in which Xu Fu forms what would have been Japan in the West Coast of North America. However, I don't want to forget the old world, but I'm faced with two real questions if I want to continue:

1. Is it feasible for the Prophet Mohammad to adopt Zoroastrianism (instead of the in-this-OTL-Nonexistant Western Chrsitianity) and unite the Middle and Kind-of-Far East (Persia)? I'm sure Mohammad would have formed a religion even if christianity wasn't around to influence him...

2. In a Roman Empire without Christianity, would the Roman Empire's fortunes be changed in any way? Without Islam to throw the Persian Empire into chaos, would it endure like the Byzantine Empires?

This is by no means a new OTL, this is just a topic with which I can explore my options with my own OTL.
 
1. Is it feasible for the Prophet Mohammad to adopt Zoroastrianism (instead of the in-this-OTL-Nonexistant Western Chrsitianity) and unite the Middle and Kind-of-Far East (Persia)? I'm sure Mohammad would have formed a religion even if christianity wasn't around to influence him...
Well, without Christianity Muhammad would have been butterflied away. We're talking about hundreds of years of butterflies here...

EDIT: Konstantin beat me to it.
 
Why does getting rid of Christianity get rid of Muhammed?:confused: He was influenced by the jews as well, as other religions around him. Christianity had a major influence on him but it wasn't the only factor. Get rid of Christianity, kill off Muhammed's ancestors and then you can get rid of Muhammed (There's a lot of butterflies in history and a lot of ways to reach the same conclusion).
 
Why does getting rid of Christianity get rid of Muhammed?:confused: He was influenced by the jews as well, as other religions around him. Christianity had a major influence on him but it wasn't the only factor. Get rid of Christianity, kill off Muhammed's ancestors and then you can get rid of Muhammed (There's a lot of butterflies in history and a lot of ways to reach the same conclusion).

No Christianity would have huge effects on Roman history, which would have huge effects on world history, which would prevent Muhammad from ever being born. Somebody else can probably explain in better than I can...

Back to the OP: I'm the opposite of an expert when it comes to Islam, especially early Islam, so I may be way off track here. But I do know that southern Arabia was under the influence/control of the Sassanids during Muhammad's lifetime. Maybe Muhammad visits a Zoroastrian temple in Yemen (if there even were any) and becomes influenced by that religion instead?
 
I see Mohammad as a liberal rebellion against increasingly unfree, static, and nasty rule from both the unchecked Persian and Roman monarchies.

So, I do believe a different figure could've come on the Zoroastrian side. Like Mohammed, he would've all but overturned the Empires by giving a relatively free alternative and better rule.
 

Cook

Banned
To avoid a fatwa as per the fate of certain cartoonists perhaps you should consider the Middle East becoming Neo-Zoroastrian without mentioning you know who.
;)
 
To a certain extent this did happen. Manichaenism was based in many ways on Zoroastrianism, and it gave Christianity some serious competition. Diocletian and Co took it seriously enough to proscribe it along with Christianity.

In the end, of course, it failed, mainly because Christianity had a 200 year head start, but variants of it lingered well into the Middle Ages.

I think your big problem, though is getting rid of Christianity itself. In it's Pauline form, it was basically "Judaism lite", a variant of Judaism freed from inconvenient customs like circumcision and dietary laws, so that the "assimilated" Jews of the Roman Empire, and eventually non-Jews as well, were open to it. Given how many Hellenised and Romanised Jews there were around by the 1C, it seems a rather high-probability event.
 
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