Sociological (not religious) WI: No Ishmael; effects on Islam and Arab identity?

All right; I know this one has been posed before, :) However, the threads I've found on the subject tend to drift into treating the question as a religious posit.

Being an agnostic, and considering, personally, Abrahamic mythology as being no more or less likely than any other, I pose the question purely as one of sociology and identity (the reason I've posted it here, and not in the ASB forum).

Assuming no biblical Ishmale (i.e., the biblical story of Abraham tells only of Isaac), what are the effects on the development of Arabic racial and cultural identity? Is Islam altered to become something unrecognisable, or butterflied as a result of cultural divergence? Assuming a recognisable Islam, is there a fundamental difference in its relationship towards the Jewish people as a race, and Jews in general? Is something apparently so insignificant likely to cause such massive butterflies as to make the modern world (or at least, the Middle-East and its political and cultural landscape) vastly different from OTL?
 
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All right; I know this one has been posed before, :) However, the threads I've found on the subject tend to drift into treating the question as a religious posit.

Being an agnostic, and considering, personally, Abrahamic mythology as being no more or less likely than any other, I pose the question purely as one of sociology and identity (the reason I've posted it here, and not in the ASB forum).

Assuming no biblical Ishmale (i.e., the biblical story of Abraham tells only of Isaac), what are the effects on the development of Arabic racial and cultural identity? Is Islam altered to become something unrecognisable, or butterflied as a result of cultural divergence? Assuming a recognisable Islam, is there a fundamental difference in its relationship towards the Jewish people as a race, and Jews in general? Is something apparently so insignificant likely to cause such massive butterflies as to make the modern world (or at least, the Middle-East and its political and cultural landscape) vastly different from OTL?

This assumes a POD about the sixth century BCE or earlier, so, in principle, nay, nothing like recognizable Islam exists, and even Christianity is theoretically a very though sell.
However, let's assume a Butterfly Killing approach where only the effects you can precisely derive from the POD are taken into account, while the rest stay EXACTLY the same.
This is not realistic, but whatver.
The Bible is slightly different from the start. What changes? Hard to say, too little evidence. Let's say nothing.
The story about Ishmael is Jewish, and attests a feeling of kinship among Jews of the time (Seventh or Sixth c. BCE probably) and those "Arabs" who identified some Ishmael, or Ismail (whatever) as eponymous ancestor. Jews and various Arabian communities were trading partners, political allies or enemies, co-subjects of various Imperial realities. At some point they developed mythical narratives of common ancestors (which may even include a grain of truth, for all we know, but that is not the point). We may assume that this, in turn, fostered relations.
In later times, Jewish communities established in Arabia IOTL. Nabatean and Jews has extensive contacts, although not always friendly ones. Would that occur to the same extent without a prior kinship narrative? And if so, wouldn't it spur the birth of another kinship narrative? Mayhaps referred to somebody more obscure, farther removed up the genealogical tree.
Who knows? But if the general outline of Jewish-"Arab" relations is the same, similar narratives arise. If not, the POD is not the lack of a story about Ishmael, is the lack of the sort of interrelation between Israel and Ishmael that led to the creation of the story. Which, if continued, would indeed change the world deeply on the long term, with the possibility of a non-monotheist, or very differently monotheist, Arabia down the line.
But going for minimal changes, letting the story not to be there but the relations still existing mostly unchanged. Let's go for we can only calculate, that is, only the little sources say. Discount the thousands of invisible threads, let's say that there is no direct causal relation we can tell between the story of Ishmael and the birth of Muhammad, his receiving a revelation. Let's assume that the genesis of the Qur'an and Sunna is historical, not divine. What we can calculate, is that there would be no reference to Ishmael in *Islam, but *Islam would still be the instrument for Arabs to claim their place in the montheist world. They've been exposed to the same religious environment, after all. They would still find plenty of biblical material suggesting relationships with the Jewish world, the Christian world. *Islam would elaborate on that. They would construct narrative of Moses coming to Mecca maybe (Iethro may be easily construed as ancestral to Arabs).
Ludicrously unlikely of course.
 
This is exactly the kind of considered, thought-out answer I couldn't find in any of the other threads on this subject. :)

This assumes a POD about the sixth century BCE or earlier, so, in principle, nay, nothing like recognizable Islam exists, and even Christianity is theoretically a very though sell.
However, let's assume a Butterfly Killing approach where only the effects you can precisely derive from the POD are taken into account, while the rest stay EXACTLY the same.

Which, as you say, is in reality tremendously unlikely (tiny changes; enormous butterflies). But yes, obviously speculation for such a POD becomes meaningless otherwise. :)

This is not realistic, but whatver.
The Bible is slightly different from the start. What changes? Hard to say, too little evidence. Let's say nothing.
The story about Ishmael is Jewish, and attests a feeling of kinship among Jews of the time (Seventh or Sixth c. BCE probably) and those "Arabs" who identified some Ishmael, or Ismail (whatever) as eponymous ancestor. Jews and various Arabian communities were trading partners, political allies or enemies, co-subjects of various Imperial realities. At some point they developed mythical narratives of common ancestors (which may even include a grain of truth, for all we know, but that is not the point). We may assume that this, in turn, fostered relations.

Makes sense.

In later times, Jewish communities established in Arabia IOTL. Nabatean and Jews has extensive contacts, although not always friendly ones. Would that occur to the same extent without a prior kinship narrative? And if so, wouldn't it spur the birth of another kinship narrative? Mayhaps referred to somebody more obscure, farther removed up the genealogical tree.

Having always been agnostic, I'm not intimately as familiar with biblical history as with other mythologies that have better caught my interest. But I'm struggling to think of another close Ishmael analogue that would create similar cultural paradigms.

[…]

But going for minimal changes, letting the story not to be there but the relations still existing mostly unchanged. Let's go for we can only calculate, that is, only the little sources say. Discount the thousands of invisible threads, let's say that there is no direct causal relation we can tell between the story of Ishmael and the birth of Muhammad, his receiving a revelation. Let's assume that the genesis of the Qur'an and Sunna is historical, not divine. What we can calculate, is that there would be no reference to Ishmael in *Islam, but *Islam would still be the instrument for Arabs to claim their place in the montheist world. They've been exposed to the same religious environment, after all. They would still find plenty of biblical material suggesting relationships with the Jewish world, the Christian world. *Islam would elaborate on that. They would construct narrative of Moses coming to Mecca maybe (Iethro may be easily construed as ancestral to Arabs).
Ludicrously unlikely of course.

Of course. :) But assuming then still a recognisable Islam, how then
might that change modern (or at least post-Islamic-creation) Jewish/Arab relations? Again, not having delved extensively into the ins and outs of Middle-Eastern politics (even though I have a fair grasp of historical Islamic development and its effects), how central is the Ishmael story to the way in which Arabic culture (and in particular, Islamic Arabic culture) regards Jews as a race?

From the little I remember, the Qur'an seems somewhat inconsistent on this point (i.e., how Jews should be regarded), but I hasten to add that certainly I've not made an extensive study of it by any means. :)
 
Of course. :) But assuming then still a recognisable Islam, how then
might that change modern (or at least post-Islamic-creation) Jewish/Arab relations? Again, not having delved extensively into the ins and outs of Middle-Eastern politics (even though I have a fair grasp of historical Islamic development and its effects), how central is the Ishmael story to the way in which Arabic culture (and in particular, Islamic Arabic culture) regards Jews as a race?

From the little I remember, the Qur'an seems somewhat inconsistent on this point (i.e., how Jews should be regarded), but I hasten to add that certainly I've not made an extensive study of it by any means. :)

I'd say that the Islamic story about Ishmael is historically more central to self-perception of Muslim Arabs than it is to their perception of Jews.
It IS, of course, important in religious terms: the Hajj rituals are said to be rooted in the story of the actions taken by Abraham, Ishmael and Hagar in Mecca. However, it is likely that these rituals have an actual historical origin in pre-Islamic pagan practices (something that Muslim tradition itself sees, regarding Islamic paganism as "corruption" of what Abraham established as a pure monotheist faith).
So, ITTL Islam would be unquestionably different in significant cultic and narrative details. But the Abrahamic connection would still somehow exist (declinated in some different way) and so would, I believe, the need to address the relationship with Jewish monotheism and Jewish tradition. The Bible would still offer geneaological grounds to purport a close relation between Jews and "Arabs" (as in, common descent from Shem, or Arpaksad, or Terach, choose you favourite Patriarch). Since the Arab genealogical memory was pretty fluid in the formative period of Islam, they'd accomodate genealogies that reflect the desired situation. An interesting option would be picking Esau, whose Biblical offspring, the Edomites, are well-placed to be put somewhere in the Arabic ancestry. Also, the "loving rivalry" that existed in Jewish material among the descendants of Jacob and Esau could be quite nicely accomodated with the similarly varying (but always emotionally relevant) relationship between Arab Muslims and Jews in historical times.
In general, the Arabic tradition has significant emotional investment (either loving or hostile, sometimes both) with cousins; it would be fitting that a story would be created about the "sibling rivalry" with Judaism on similar lines of being "cousins" at some level.
In short, if they need an *Ishmael, someone would invent him. ;)
Going to the modern period, the problem is not about Judaism, it is about Zionism. I don't think that Ishmael narratives play a major role in the current clusterfuck.
 
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