Alternate history exercise - Middle East without Islam

[Winner]

Who says that it was Islam that made them conquerors? If it were - as you assume - just a question of unity, then this could have been achieved by other means as well, for example a specific christian faith or sect. (as, some would say, islam was in the beginning).

I just don't believe in "Religion makes people go to war".

Islam certainly did. It united the Arabs and the energy they had previously been spending on fighting each other was harnessed and used for outwards expansion.

They were so lucky that the Byzantines and Persians had just beaten the crap out of each other and were unable to resist them properly. Persia ended up much worse, obviously, but Byzantines lost some of their richest provinces.

Religion justifies war, yes. But it's nearly impossible to say that this really was the reason for these men, soldiers and mostly merchants...! Because you really can't tell how these people felt. So, my point, it's up to you to prove that things would have taken a different turn, not mine to defend that they were the same...

Without Islam, there would be no force to unite the various Arabic tribes and give them a mission to spread the true religion by sword (and getting rich in the process). They'd most certainly remain in Arabia, doing what they've always done.

 

[plarq]

Islam certainly did. It united the Arabs and the energy they had previously been spending on fighting each other was harnessed and used for outwards expansion.

They were so lucky that the Byzantines and Persians had just beaten the crap out of each other and were unable to resist them properly. Persia ended up much worse, obviously, but Byzantines lost some of their richest provinces.



Without Islam, there would be no force to unite the various Arabic tribes and give them a mission to spread the true religion by sword (and getting rich in the process). They'd most certainly remain in Arabia, doing what they've always done.

Christianity could do that too. So instead of Islam, a church of Christianity would do the job that Islam did in OTL.

 

[Winner]

I think you may be trying to make it a little too rosy. I'm not saying Islam is some sort of elixir, but when a large area gets united under a single, enlightened ruler, prosperity is the typical result. I just don't see who else would be doing the uniting.

And I don't see a reason why political unity of the whole region should be considered a prerequisite for prosperity.

Arab conquests were generally the nicest conquests you'd find anywhere. They left existing institutions almost completely intact, and generally didn't go around massacring people for the fun of it.

Uh, let's not idealize their methods. Yes, surely the Arabs were nowhere near as brutal as, say, the Mongols but I wouldn't say that it was particularly rosy either:

The local inhabitants made a desperate last stand at Veh Ardashir against the Arabs who finally broke into all of Ctesiphon in 637. For the first time the Arabs witnessed the riches ,luxuries , arts architecture and sophistication of one of the world’s great empires. Looting reached epic proportions. One fifth of the looted goods were sent from Ctesiphon to Caliph Omar at Medina. So great was the haul of booty that every Arab soldier was able to appropriate 12000 Dirhams worth of goods roughly the equivalent of 250,000 US Dollars at the time of writing. Nearly 40,000 captured Sassanian noblemen were taken to Arabia and sold as slaves

The disruption of the existing civilizations must have been huge.

Nice thought, but a Byzantine conquest of Spain seems unlikely to ever last. See: every other time they tried it.

The main problem plaguing the Eastern Empire was its over-extension in time when barbarians were pressing it on all fronts, plague damaged its economy and the "byzantine-style" plots were leading to inefficient use of the resources they had left.

But, without Islam delivering the killing blow, it would have probably stabilized and consolidated. Then it's plausible some other emperor would renew the dream of recovering the West. North Africa and parts of Italy were already in Roman hands and the existing barbarian kingdom in Iberia was so weak that a determined Roman campaign could break its resistance - after all, the Arabs were not having a hard time conquering Spain either.

So you mean, exactly what Islam did?

Well, yes. I was reacting to your assertion that without Islam, there would be no trade with the East.

Why? It didn't exactly decide to do this for the last seven centuries it was around...

For the same reasons Islam expanded into East Africa - trade.

 

[Winner]

Christianity could do that too. So instead of Islam, a church of Christianity would do the job that Islam did in OTL.

Not really.

First, Christianity by that time was not really a crusading religion; Islam OTOH was a religion well-suited for conquest.

Second, the Christianized Arabs would have to expand into Christian-held territory, which would remove the moral advantage

- "And we the true believers are going to wage a holy war against the infidels..."
= "Umm, sir, they're Christians just as we are."
- "Damn it, Ali, you just ruined everything!"

 

[Lone Wolf]

And large swathes afterwards, too. I hear the Poles even occupied Moscow for awhile during the smuta.

Not really, the last major annexation (of Smolensk) was in Vitautas' time, shortly before the union and mass conversion of Lituanians to Catholicism. By the end of reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had already lost Smolensk and Chernigov. (Even the Commonwealth's gains after the Livonian War were quite minor). Although Polish forces managed to occupy Moscow during the Smuta, they were quite quickly driven out, though they've returned parts of their Eastern holdings for some time. But they never managed to annex more territories then they held in, say, 1465.

On a side note, an Orthodox Lithuania would be quite an interesting theme for AH.

 

[Winner]

Not really, the last major annexation (of Smolensk) was in Vitautas' time, shortly before the union and mass conversion of Lituanians to Catholicism. By the end of reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had already lost Smolensk and Chernigov. (Even the Commonwealth's gains after the Livonian War were quite minor). Although Polish forces managed to occupy Moscow during the Smuta, they were quite quickly driven out, though they've returned parts of their Eastern holdings for some time. But they never managed to annex more territories then they held in, say, 1465.

On a side note, an Orthodox Lithuania would be quite an interesting theme for AH.

Not just Lithuania.

Orthodox was the form of Christianity which was introduced first in Great Moravia (the West Slavic state that existed on the territory of present-day Czech Rep, Slovakia and parts of Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary in the 9th century).

If they Eastern Empire had been stronger than it historically was, it is possible that the nations in Central Europe would have sticked to the Orthodox form, rather than replacing it with Latin rite later on.

 

[Plotinus]

Not really.

First, Christianity by that time was not really a crusading religion; Islam OTOH was a religion well-suited for conquest.

Second, the Christianized Arabs would have to expand into Christian-held territory, which would remove the moral advantage

- "And we the true believers are going to wage a holy war against the infidels..."
= "Umm, sir, they're Christians just as we are."
- "Damn it, Ali, you just ruined everything!"

I won't dispute your first point, but your second is obviously false since all these different Christian churches really hated each other. That's why plenty of Monophysites welcomed the Muslim conquests, because they would rather live under Muslims than under Chalcedonians. Now before the rise of Islam, the version of Christianity most common in the Arabian peninsula was Monophysitism - in fact the Ghassanids, who were the most powerful Arabian group on the eve of Islam's rise and acted as power brokers between the Byzantines and the Sassanids, were Monophysite Christians. There were other Monophysites throughout the Middle East too, especially in Syria as well as Armenia, Nubia, and Ethiopia. However, Egypt was divided between Monophysites and Chalcedonians (or Melkites, as they were known there). Most Christians in the Sassanid empire were Nestorians, the absolute opposite of Monophysites. And the Byzantines were of course mostly Chalcedonian. One of the reasons that first the Sassanids and then the Arabs tolerated or even encouraged the Christians throughout Persia was that, being Nestorians, they hated the Byzantines and were therefore A Good Thing.

Whether that would have meant that, in the absence of Islam, a powerful Church of the East would eventually have gone to war with the Orthodox Church is impossible to say, although it seems unlikely.

 

[Tee Kay]

Second, the Christianized Arabs would have to expand into Christian-held territory, which would remove the moral advantage

- "And we the true believers are going to wage a holy war against the infidels..."
= "Umm, sir, they're Christians just as we are."
- "Damn it, Ali, you just ruined everything!"

Didn't stop the medieval and renaissance and modern Europeans.

 

[Winner]

Didn't stop the medieval and renaissance and modern Europeans.

Wrong comparison. Warfare between countries of the same religion is common, but if you want to mobilize many states/tribes of the same religion for a HOLY war (that's the important difference), you need to define an enemy who doesn't follow the one true religion.

The difference is obvious. Medieval European kingdoms warred with each other almost all the time, but many united in crusades against the infidel Muslim Turks/Saracens.

Conversely, Arab tribes united for a Jihad against the unbelievers. It would IMO be harder to unite them for just another ordinary war against people sharing their religion (basically). Various Christian creeds might have hated each other, but I doubt they'd wage a full-fledged holy wars against each other.

 

[Dachs]

Various Christian creeds might have hated each other, but I doubt they'd wage a full-fledged holy wars against each other.

Ain't you a Czech?

 

[Tee Kay]

Wrong comparison. Warfare between countries of the same religion is common, but if you want to mobilize many states/tribes of the same religion for a HOLY war (that's the important difference), you need to define an enemy who doesn't follow the one true religion.

The difference is obvious. Medieval European kingdoms warred with each other almost all the time, but many united in crusades against the infidel Muslim Turks/Saracens.

Conversely, Arab tribes united for a Jihad against the unbelievers. It would IMO be harder to unite them for just another ordinary war against people sharing their religion (basically). Various Christian creeds might have hated each other, but I doubt they'd wage a full-fledged holy wars against each other.

Was actually thinking about protestant-catholic wars, wars against heretics like the Cathars, etc. European kingdoms that fought together in the Crusades were all Catholic. When they encountered Christians of other denominations in the East, they weren't particularly friendly to them.

 

[Masada]

wars against heretics like the Cathars, etc

There was a certain lack of religiosity in that.

 

[Plotinus]

Wrong comparison. Warfare between countries of the same religion is common, but if you want to mobilize many states/tribes of the same religion for a HOLY war (that's the important difference), you need to define an enemy who doesn't follow the one true religion.

The difference is obvious. Medieval European kingdoms warred with each other almost all the time, but many united in crusades against the infidel Muslim Turks/Saracens.

They were all Catholics. Don't you know anything about the history of Middle Eastern Christianity? Don't you know that the hatred between these people was older, and deeper, than any between Christians and Muslims in that region? Chalceconians had been killing Monophysites since before the Prophet was ever born.

You can't assume that just because they were all Christians you can be sure that they would relate to each other the way that European Christians all related to each other. The Middle East is not Europe and the histories of the churches there is not the same. Even the divisions between Catholic and Protestant are nothing compared to the ancient divisions between the Middle Eastern churches.

I'm not saying that they would have gone to war with each other. I'm just saying that you can't assume that they wouldn't just because of European history.

 

[North King]

They spent a small expeditionary force to secure a fairly large province with high revenue that stayed more or less intact for decades with minimal support?

Because that's all they could afford. Are you saying you expect it to work again and again?

So to wonder whether Christianity would have become the dominant religion in the absence of Islam is to overlook the fact that it already was.

Huh? I don't dispute that the Nestorians et al. were one of the more important religions of the East, nor that their cultural contributions for the first couple of centuries of the Islamic Empire perhaps outstripped even Muslim contributions, but to say they were the dominant religion is to overlook the more powerful and centralized church of the Zoroastrians.

And I don't see a reason why political unity of the whole region should be considered a prerequisite for prosperity.

Because that's what generally happens? Not just this example, but numerous other ones: the Romans for the Mediterranean, the various Persian Empires, the Tang for China, Japan when it finally got its act together, the Gupta and Maurya for India... I'm not going to say that political unity is a cure-all for economic and social problems, but it goes a long way towards a more prosperous region. The two are correlated too often to deny that, and its plainly evident to anyone who studies history that when an army goes around ravaging cities and farmland every ten to twenty years, which was the result of the Roman-Sassinid rivalry, then prosperity can never set in.

Uh, let's not idealize their methods. Yes, surely the Arabs were nowhere near as brutal as, say, the Mongols but I wouldn't say that it was particularly rosy either:

The disruption of the existing civilizations must have been huge.

Oh, please. Like any other civilization didn't do this, too. There are numerous examples of Arab conquests where their generals spared citizenry when most other civilizations would have massacred them wholesale. They generally left the dhimmi be, and in many cases when building a new mosque on the site of the old church, would pay the Christians for the land they took. They were a model of tolerance.

As for the economic and social structures of the lands they took, the Arabs left them almost completely intact; Persian and Byzantine organization was only changed in who was at the top of the ladder.

But, without Islam delivering the killing blow, it would have probably stabilized and consolidated.

Why? And even if it did, then why would it remain stable long enough to conquer the west, and then remain stable even longer to colonize that?

Well, yes. I was reacting to your assertion that without Islam, there would be no trade with the East.

Reduced =/= 0.

For the same reasons Islam expanded into East Africa - trade.

Which, as I have stated above, would be reduced in a region that would still be torn by the violence between Rome and Persia -- not to mention the Arabs who, deprived of Empire, would still be raiding the frontiers.

 

[Dachs]

Because that's all they could afford. Are you saying you expect it to work again and again?

Nice thought, but a Byzantine conquest of Spain seems unlikely to ever last. See: every other time they tried it.

Wording issue?

 

[North King]

Wording issue?

Yeah, I suppose.

 

[knez]

The Christians would probably not make too much progress, IMHO. Persia might have been temporarily in a bit of a mess, but it was otherwise spectacularly successful throughout this period. There's a reason that contemporaries judged Khosrau Anushirvan to be greater than Justinian, and a reason too that the Arab Conquest was within two centuries subsumed into a Persian Renaissance. But still, there wouldn't be any huge shift in the dynamic; there hadn't been for the past few centuries. Why should there be now?

Politics aside, the area would be much, much, much the poorer for it all. The Arabs united half of Asia and the nearer side of Africa for a time under a single banner. The time of peace and plenty that resulted was one of the heights of human achievement -- of ALL human civilization, not just the Near East. Quite apart from the idea of the Arabs transmitting Classical ideas back to Europe (it is important, but not as much as most would like to have you believe), the Arabs made leaps and bounds in science in all fields, and a lot of that got imparted into Europe.

Without Islam, Spain would be languishing under the Visigoths or some successor, putzing its way along in lethargic obscurity. Without Islam, Sicily would not have been a cultural and economic powerhouse, however briefly. Without Islam, Egypt would probably still be a religious mess (I can't agree, Dachs, that Monosyphites and the Orthodoxy would ever get along past a temporary reconciliation...) and never have undergone the flowering that the early Fatamids ushered in. Hundreds of polymaths and savants in all fields would likely have died or never been born. Sassanid Persia patronized philosophers, to be sure, but not with the same degree of success. The Byzantines were too often caught up in their own religious absurdities to give the same kind of treatment to scholars that Islam ever did.

In short, we'd be set back about five hundred years scientifically, and culturally one of the greatest artistic syncretisms of all time would never take place. Politically the region would be unchanged.

So, in conclusion: a craphole.

that's all completely ignoring the fact that Islam divided Mediterranean in half, which almost completely destroyed sea trade and sent Europe from decline after fall of Rome into "dark" that lasted cca 200 to 300 hundred years?

"gathering knowledge" through crusades etc. wouldn't even be necessary in this no islam scenario (it wouldn’t be destroyed in the first place (btw influence of classical art and so called science on development of western civilization is overrated anyway))

in my opinion
technological state of modern civilization would completely depend upon weather or not capitalism would be established after crisis in Europe which correlated with the end of the medieval warm period (and would happen in this scenario as well&#8230

I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be established…

 

[Dachs]

that's all completely ignoring the fact that Islam divided Mediterranean in half, which almost completely destroyed sea trade and sent Europe from decline after fall of Rome into "dark" that lasted cca 200 to 300 hundred years?

Give the Vandals credit where it's due.

 

[North King]

that's all completely ignoring the fact that Islam divided Mediterranean in half, which almost completely destroyed sea trade and sent Europe from decline after fall of Rome into "dark" that lasted cca 200 to 300 hundred years?

Eh, trade took a while to recover, yes. When it did, it went splendidly.

"gathering knowledge" through crusades etc. wouldn't even be necessary in this no islam scenario (it wouldn’t be destroyed in the first place

Say what? Muslim conquests did very little in the way of destroying knowledge.

(btw influence of classical art and so called science on development of western civilization is overrated anyway))

Well duh. Islamic science had a greater impact than the rediscovery of classical sciences.

in my opinion
technological state of modern civilization would completely depend upon weather or not capitalism would be established after crisis in Europe which correlated with the end of the medieval warm period (and would happen in this scenario as well…)

I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be established…

That completely ignores the leaps and bounds made by scientists of Muslim Spain, the Near East, and Central Asia, who reinvented medicine, astronomy and mathematics, and practically invented chemistry. European technological achievement was advanced by hundreds of years by borrowing from their often more civilized and typically more enlightened neighbors.

 

[RalofTyr]

According to Ayn Rand, the middle east would be completely different as Islam is the driving force behind that region.