About a year ago, I read David Morgan's The Mongols, which provides a decent introduction to the career of Genghis Khan and his sucessors, and now I'm reading The Golden Age of Persia by Richard Frye, which is a history of Iran from the Arab conquest to the Seljuk invasion. When you look at it, there are a lot of similarities between Genghis Khan's Mongols and the early Arab caliphate. Both were essentially nomadic confederacies which took advantage of weak settled empires surrounding them. Both relied on cavalry, and took advantage of the fact that virtually all of their men had military experience, which was more than the settled states around them could boast. Both used these advantages to construct giant, multicultural empires covering a great deal of territory.
However, the Arabs had their own religion-Islam-that provided a unifying force the Mongols lacked. The spread of Islam partially-and in many cases entirely-Arabized much of the Caliphate's territory and ensured that even after it fell its cultural legacy was dramatic in the lands it had conquered. The Mongols, on the other hand, were only held together by the personalities and political acumen of Genghis Khan and his children. Once that went away, the Mongol empire broke apart, and its successor states gradually took on the culture, religion, and language of whatever area they ruled. While the Mongols did have considerable cultural influences in some of the regions they conquered (particularly Iran and Central Asia), they nowhere approach the cultural significance of the caliphate.
With all that said, what if Genghis Khan was a prophet, who produced his own religion, complete with holy books, that all the Mongol armies and administrators believed in? At first, they would heavily depend on Muslim, Confucian, and Christian native elites to rule their conquests-but then again, the early Caliphate was in much the same position (Greek was actually used as an administrative language in it until, IIRC, around 800 AD). With Genghis Khan (or his ATL equivalent) being both a political and religious authority, the empire might hold together for 200-300 years after his death, long enough for large sections of the population to adopt "Genghis Khanism", and with it a large degree of Mongol cultural influences.
Any of this sound remotely plausible?
However, the Arabs had their own religion-Islam-that provided a unifying force the Mongols lacked. The spread of Islam partially-and in many cases entirely-Arabized much of the Caliphate's territory and ensured that even after it fell its cultural legacy was dramatic in the lands it had conquered. The Mongols, on the other hand, were only held together by the personalities and political acumen of Genghis Khan and his children. Once that went away, the Mongol empire broke apart, and its successor states gradually took on the culture, religion, and language of whatever area they ruled. While the Mongols did have considerable cultural influences in some of the regions they conquered (particularly Iran and Central Asia), they nowhere approach the cultural significance of the caliphate.
With all that said, what if Genghis Khan was a prophet, who produced his own religion, complete with holy books, that all the Mongol armies and administrators believed in? At first, they would heavily depend on Muslim, Confucian, and Christian native elites to rule their conquests-but then again, the early Caliphate was in much the same position (Greek was actually used as an administrative language in it until, IIRC, around 800 AD). With Genghis Khan (or his ATL equivalent) being both a political and religious authority, the empire might hold together for 200-300 years after his death, long enough for large sections of the population to adopt "Genghis Khanism", and with it a large degree of Mongol cultural influences.
Any of this sound remotely plausible?