WI : No Islamic splintering

anyone willing to come with a guess how the world would look like if Shia and Sunni Islam either never disagreed in the first place about whom should be the caliph, or at some point in early Islamic history found agreement again or one of them invalidate the other to a degree where it was no bigger than other denominations.
 

Deleted member 67076

Stronger Caliphate that's for sure. You might see a greater Islamic presence in places like Spain and the Balkans.
 
Easier to not have Shia appearing, I would think. However, it would be hard to have Islam never splitting, except if it does not expand as much as it did.

See, maybe more than in Christianism, Islam served as well to exprim political beliefs and different schools, or branchs of Islamic religions were partially due to claims of political factions.

By exemple, Shia Islam is both the expression of first the sucession fight, then the expression of non-Arab Muslims (that were treated by Arab as dhimmis). Shia wasn't originally that much different than Sunna, and it's their lasting division and independent life that managed to make them taking different ways ( abit like Latin and Greek Christianism whom the differences were particularly minor up to XI century, but began to differ more greatly precisly because they were divided).

So, my two cents.

Prevent expand Rashidun Caliphate as much as it did : have them conquer Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia (while I would maybe think it would be better to not conquer all of it).
Making that, you managed to have less rebel minorities : granted you have more Christian than anything else, but they won't convert up to some centuries. More interestingly you managed to have no converted minorities (like Berbers that adopted OTL a really "revolutionnary" form of Shia Islam).

With that, you certainly slowed the risk of division.

Eventually, you'll need to have Arab treating non-Arab (if they're Muslims) as superior than dhimmis (I don't ask to have them treated as equals, it would be too hard to reach for the first centuries), maybe a line of energic caliphs whom the shorter than IOTL conquests would give more time to fortify their empire?
 
so ... basically what your saying Catilina is that the Caliphate was too expansionistic successful in the formative years after Mohammed's death, to make a 'religiously homogenized' nation with a solid infrastructural 'state church'?
 
Well, it's not really about the expansionist part that admittedly did much to strengthen Islam. It's more about it led to more powerful political factions, with more important ressources, and backed by newly converted for Shia.

There's places where Islam managed to impose itself only by having a "national" form as Persia, or Maghrib. Expansionnism alone isn't the biggest problem, it's where the Caliphate expanded in first place.

But, yes roughly it's this : less expansion would mean more efforts put by at least some Arab factions to rule efficiently, less possibilities to have to deal with populations with a real anti-Arab posture...

I don't think you would have an "homogenous" religion still : Shia pretty well appeared in the earlier times of the Caliphate and it would be difficult to get rid of it : but without popular support outside the faction itself it could likely became a "school" of Islam (as madhism for Sunnism) being less conflicting and different. Maybe ending to decline and vanish.
 
Keeping the Sunni-Shia split from happening could be quite late actually-depending on when you actually place the split, you could do a PoD from c. 750(the Abbasids don't alienate as many of their backers who were supporters of Ali), 850/900(Fatimids never get off the ground) or even c. 1450(honestly, just keep the Safavids from becoming Shiite and starting their weird messianic movement and a lot of the Ottoman-Safavid wars that pushed Sunnism and Shiism to define each other as large opposed sects, not to mention the mass conversion of Iran, doesn't happen).
 
I don't really get what you mean here.

The Shia/Sunnit split was already happening in the late VII century, and all the changes you could do about it would be at best considering it as a school of Islam rather than a different deonomination.

And during all the VIII, Shia and derivated denomination (as kharidjism tough it could considered as a different one) began to really expand in the Arabo-Muslim world.

The PODs you propose, while totally legit if about to limit Shia expansion and sucess trough history, doesn't resolve the issue of having a schism in first place.

That said, I disagree about Abassids or Fatimids.

1) It would be difficult to make Abassids tolerating Shia followers, seeing how much these ones deconsidered his legitimacy. Having them still supporting Shia would be done at the expense of their own claims to Caliphate, as they didn't had a great legitimacy to do so according Shia beliefs.

And, as I said above, Shia was mainly the faith of political factions considered less "Arabs", more despised. It would be hard for Abassids to continue their policy of compromise and balance with that, and could weaken their power eventually.

2) Alienating Fatimids wouldn't be easy. What could prevent them from appearing? They were virtually unopposed in Ifryqia, only encountered some resistence from Umayyeads in Maghrib,
Even if they didn't conquered Egypt (no matter the PoD, let's assume they don't) they would still be an important dynasty ruling basically all Berber regions.

Do you have some ideas on how to prevent their apparition? I, genuily, don't know how to, so if you have some clues about it...
 
RE: Fatimids; honestly just getting rid of the early Ismaili missionaries to the Kutama Berbers ought to do the trick as far as keeping the Fatimids from emerging as a rival caliphate. Which is exactly my goal. The problem isn't a rival polity emerging in North Africa so much as a rival polity that explictly saw itself as legitimate while the Abbasids weren't. And to clarify-what I am going for is keeping the political split over the succession from absorbing all the tendencies of future Shiism and Sunni and Shia becoming explictly antagonistic sects-something that my PoDs tend to revolve around. I'm quite fine with a situation of "Maybe there are a handful of people who actively see themselves as partisans of the one true Islam, but they're marginal and by and large everyone considers whether or not you follow Jafar al-Sadiq to be a difference of madhab or methodology within the framework of orthodox Islam rather than a actual sectarian disagreement, just as people who are Hanbalis do things differently from Hanafis but still consider the Hanafis good orthodox Muslims who are perfectly entitled to do what they do".
 
RE: Fatimids; honestly just getting rid of the early Ismaili missionaries to the Kutama Berbers ought to do the trick as far as keeping the Fatimids from emerging as a rival caliphate.
While it could butterfly the most threatenings aspects of Fatimids dynasty, couldn't a kharidjit Berber dynasty could replace them as dominants in North Africa?

They had demonstrated caliphal tencencies quite early (since the Berber Revolt), after all. Admittedly it was the expression of a radical kharidjism while moderate branch political ideal tended more to tribal state or city state.
How the Aghblabids ruled over their population would make hard to remove the rise of a new kharidjit radicalism even if Ismaili missionaries are removed.
It's even probable than "orthodox" Shia concurrenced already kharidjism as far than the late VIII/early IX.

The Ifryiqia knowing quite an important religious activity (both among erbers and Arabs where malikism became more present and revendicative) and Aghlabids (being pretty well disconsidered) and Abassids unable to help them (being busy enough with their own troubles), wouldn't have been a matter of time before a radical religious branch-backed dynasty take over?

You're right that Ismailism gave a great deal about legitimacy and probably this XYZ Dynasty would interpret more a caliphal claim (that is not automatic) as in order to guarantee an inner legitimity (as Umayyad Caliphate in Al-Andalus) rather an hegemonical one.

You'll end with a more conservative, more isolationist branch of Islam westwards, and even if you prevent appearance of mass chiism in Iran, you'll have still a Maghrib/Ifryqian outside the sunna branch of Islam, and being present in all North Africa (maybe without Egypt), it would be minoritary but not really "marginal" (somewhere between OTL Shia and Ibadism, around 7,5%)
 
I believe there will still be some kind of split even if the actual Sunni-Shi'a division never happens. The fact is that there were many, many Muslims who were unhappy about the first Caliphate. The Kharijites were never happy with the first Caliphs, many recent converts complained heavily that they were treated as inferior, and there was a concerted effort among the business community of Mecca to take control of the empire that was resented by more austere members. If Ali never broke away from the leadership, I believe someone else would have attracted those dissenters.
 
Have Islam remain a regional religion confined to the Arabian peninsula.

When it comes right down to it is not possible to prevent a religion from splitting into denominations once it becomes large population-wise and/or covers a broad area, I mean just look at all the other world religions, they're all split into multiple groups (Hinduism itself is more like a grouping of similar religions than an actual single religion as a whole).
 
anyone willing to come with a guess how the world would look like if Shia and Sunni Islam either never disagreed in the first place about whom should be the caliph, or at some point in early Islamic history found agreement again or one of them invalidate the other to a degree where it was no bigger than other denominations.
Here's a very easy suggestion that fulfills your request to a T: Sheykh Safi-al-Din never gets his order off the ground and Sheykh Junyad thus doesn't have a platform to turn the order from a powerful but still orthodox Sunni order to a militant and rather extremist(as in, regarding the leaders of the order as on par with Ali and as quasi-divine extremist) Shia order and/or gets the order destroyed if he tries to do it. The territory that Sheykh Junyad claimed OTL are absorbed throughly into the Whitesheep Turkoman domains, some other state cleans up the mess left by the Timurids-maybe the Whitesheep Turkomans manage to defeat the Blacksheep Turkomans a little more throughly and become the undisputed Iranian power for some reasonably plausible length of time. Anyhow the important point is that we don't have an extremist Shia dynasty take over Iran and go to war with the Ottomans, pushing the Ottomans to crack down on anything that is remotely Shia including sufi lodges of the wrong sort. Instead, you get a situation where this strand of folk Islam(veneration of saints, including Ali, a chain of religious teaching akin to both the Imamate and the structure of a Sufi order) is seen as firmly within the orthodox fold even where Ali is incorporated in some way, Jafari jurisprudence is simply another madhab and Jafar al-Sadiq seen as a perfectly orthodox Muslim(and even in his day his being the Imam did not prevent non-Shias from considering him a good muslim and respected legal thinker) and being a partisan of Ali or even *Shia* isn't seen as a barrier to recognizing the existing government as legitimate. If anything the latter ought to be easier now that the Caliphate is universally marginalized and there's no reason for the Ottomans to demand the caliphate or make a big deal of it TTL. Because there are fewer concrete differences that make someone Sunni or Shia in this timeline, it is also possible for this timeline to have more of a grey zone for affiliation and for it being normal for Muslims to move across the continuum.
 
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