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To set things straight - no, I'm not some teen who gets wet dreams about the destruction of Islam. This is a purely (*ahem*) academic question.

In the mid first millenium, the near east was dominated by two competing "superpowers" - the Roman Empire, and the Sassanid Persian Empire. Their spheres of influence met in the Levant, and it was there that they fought their endless campaigns and skirmishes, but it was also ironically the place where their authority was weakest. Having exhausted themselves in the largest of a series of wars between themselves from 602 to 638, in which both sides devastated the richest lands of the other, the Romans and the Persians were at the weakest and most overstretched point in their histories. Meanwhile, the uniting of the Arab tribes under the common banner of Islam (rather than among petty chieftains and princelings) allowed large Arab armies to mount organized invasions of Roman and Persian territory, rather than disorganized banditry and raids, and successfully defeated (and destroyed) large Roman and Persian counterattacks, eventually taking the whole of the Sassanid Empire and vast swathes of the Roman Empire (which I after this point in history call the Byzantine Empire).

My question is this - was it inevitable that at some point there would be a moment of mutual weakness among both Romans and Persians, such that the Arabs or some other forgotten nomadic minority, unified by a new ideology or religion, could defeat them both and take massive amounts of land that had been Roman and Persian for nearly a millenia? What if only one empire is tottering on rotten supports? What if there are two competing religions or ideologies, and/or conquering ethnic groups?
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