WI: No Islam, what happens to the Visigoths?

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
AFAIK Catalonia is derived from Gotalonia, being the part of Hispania with the most Goths in it. But I could be wrong.
I gave this as a possibility, an alternative to the OTL adoption of name Hispania for both peoples, i.e. the local Romans and the Goths.
 
Last edited:
I argued that the Berber and Arab conquerors of Spain weren't Muslims in a modern sense of the word. Islam in it's modern form was arguably only starting to take place at this stage. To the people who they conquerored they would have been seen most likely as Christians, although subscribing to a form deemed heretical than followers of a separate religion.

There are serious historical problems about the sources we have for the early history of Islam. The earliest biography of the Prophet Muhammad was Ibn Ishaq which was mid 8th century, which was included in Ibn Hisham which was written around the turn of the 9th century. Sahih Bukhari which contains sayings attributed to Muhammad was written around the mid 9th century, the histories of Al-Tabari are from the early to mid 9th century as well. Those are the earliest sources and apart from Ibn Ishaq (7th century which we don't have a primary source) they date from the early to mid 9th century, at least 200 years after Muhammad had died.

I mean, I agree that Modern Islam is relatively different from its ancestor in the Rashidun Era but it wasn't like it was unrecognizable. In any case, what I was specifically refuting was this claim you made:

Instead we need to consider the Arab and Berber forces being Christians although subscribing to a Nontrinitarian form.

Archeological evidence (as shown earlier) has proven that the modern Qur'an can be radiocarbon dated to the life of the Prophet, which means that the basic text of Islam was already in its final and modern form by the Rashidun Era (which logically precludes any idea that the early Muslims were Christians - the Qur'an makes quite clear that it sees Christianity as a respected old faith, but no longer the divinely-revealed truth). Of course Christians would initially consider Muslims to be heretical Christians - they didn't quite understand what Islam was at first, so they used the closest analogy they had in their experience - if the Qur'an was already in its final form by then, we definitely know that the earliest Muslims didn't consider themselves Christians.

Also, your point about Ibn Ishaq being the first collector of Seerah is a commonly-cited misconception: both Ibn Shihab az-Zuhri (born only 50 years after Hijrah) and Yazīd ibn Abī Ḥabīb were much older than Ibn Ishaq and Al-Kurtami might be even older. I do agree, though, that many of the hadith sources commonly touted as being the word of Muhammad are rather unverifiably accurate at best and obviously latter-day fabrications at worst.
 
Last edited:

To be fair to Ibnyahya I will say that it seems unlikely that the early Berber groups who performed the conquest were highly Islamic, or even that Pious. I say this just based on the Witch Queen of the Maghreb, and the historical lack of success that Islam had in even Islamising the Bedouin, something that the Ikhwan had to end.
 
To be fair to Ibnyahya I will say that it seems unlikely that the early Berber groups who performed the conquest were highly Islamic, or even that Pious. I say this just based on the Witch Queen of the Maghreb, and the historical lack of success that Islam had in even Islamising the Bedouin, something that the Ikhwan had to end.

Oh, most definitely. It would be incorrect to say that the Islam the Arabs brought to the Berbers was simply Christianity, but the Berbers (although relatively quick converts when compared to other populations that took a century or two to get a majority of nominally Muslim inhabitants) were very syncretic - almost to the point of being Berber pagans with a thin Islamic veneer over their religious practices.


Of course, the great irony of this is that the famously puritanical and rigorist Almohad Muslims that storm through al-Andalus and abolish jizya (actually being some of the few Muslims to live up to the "convert or die!" image of the Islamic conquests) later on were Berbers themselves!
 
Top