MotF 56: The True Believers

Krall

Banned
The True Believers


The Challenge
Make a map showing a world where a religion or religious sect that became a major religion/sect in OTL remains or becomes minor and restricted to a small area.


The Restrictions
There are no restrictions on when your PoD or map can be set. Future maps are allowed, but ASB (i.e. blatant implausibility) is not.


If you're not sure whether your idea meets the criteria of this challenge, please feel free to PM me.


This round shall finish on Saturday the 7th of April.

!THIS THREAD IS FOR POSTING OF ENTRIES ONLY!

Any discussion must take place in the main thread. If you post anything other than a map entry (or a description accompanying a map entry) in this thread then you will be asked to delete the post. If you refuse to delete the post, post something that is clearly disruptive or malicious, or post spam then you may be disqualified from entering in this round of MotF and you may be reported to the board's moderators.


Remember to vote on the previous round of MoF!
 
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Cyrus the Great decides not to release the Jewish people from their Babylonian exile, and only a few end up returning to the land of Judah. Instead, over time the religious composition of the Levant shifts towards the Samaritans, a Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group descended from the northern kingdom of Israel, with their own version of the Torah and their own holy site of Mount Gerizim.

The Achaemenid Empire dominated the Near East for several centuries, and at times exerted some measure of control over the Greek mainland. As a result, Magna Graecia saw a bit more immigration, and a Greek-speaking polity in Sicily was for several centuries the major rival of the rising Roman Republic for control of the Western Mediterranean before being overcome.

The Roman Republic of this world had little in common with that of ours, being in some ways both more and less Hellenized, but over time it acquired significant eastern territories from a variety of Achaemenid successors, including a largely Samaritan "Kingdom of Israel." The Samaritans got along somewhat better with their new overlords than the Jews did with the OTL Romans, and were not scattered across the Empire. Neither do they spawn any sort of spin-off interested in converting large numbers of Gentiles; Samaritanism remains strongly linked to its homeland and its holy places.

Fast-forward a couple of millennia. Rome is long since fallen, though its influence remains in many nations of the Mediterranean, even those overrun by Celts, Germans, and various nomadic peoples. The Near East was, for a long time, split between an Egypt-based Roman successor, and a resurgent Persia, with Israel usually falling under the sway of the former. But in recent centuries, the diverse states of western Europe have been experiencing a scientific and industrial revolution, while the empires of the Near East have fallen behind. Persia has retreated into a state of semi-isolation, while the last dynasty of Egypt has been overthrown: without them, the lands of the Levant have been splitting apart along ancient ethnic and religious faultlines, and a Samaritan state of Israel has emerged once more.

And in the unremarkable provincial town of Yerushalem dwell the last members of an obscure and dwindling sect known as "Ezraic Samaritans," or "Yehudim," of interest only to a few ethnologists...

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In 1549 the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier and his associates arrived in Japan and are welcomed in the Niponese capital city of Kioto after a slightly troublesome period in Kiushiu. Through his charismatic appearance his reputation spread, so he was allowed to speak to the Emperor on Christmas Eve 1549 [1].

Emperor Tomohito / Go-Nara was fascinated by the Portuguese man and welcomed his preaching after many converted nobles offered increased support for the impoverished emperor. In the following years Protestant missionaries entered the country, the number of Christians in Nipon grew steadily.

So it came that in 1622 Emperor Ayahito announced his controversial conversion to Roman Catholicism, thus making Nipon a Christian nation. In the still mostly Shintoist north of Nipon various nobles banded together and formed the Kawabe Shogunate, which aligned itself with the late Ming Dynasty, later with the Qing and the Russians. The Kawabe Shogunate would become a safe haven for the remaining Niponese Shinto devotees.

[1] The POD, ladies and gentlemen! Xavier did not reach the emperor in OTL and since he has here the imperial reaction to Christians in much more open.

 
In 1530, Vasili III was no longer laughing at the Catholics trying to defend themselves from the Protestants in Western Europe; he himself was having to defend himself from the Protestants in Muscovy. Within a few years, the Protestants had gained so much popularity that the Grand Prince had two options: start a civil war in Muscovy or flee Muscovy.

Vasili chose the latter, and while he originally intended to go to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the polzarizing of Orthodox Christians there had begun early, and the area was quite unstable. By then, the Protestants had already gotten into power and so they sent him off to the Khanate of Sibir, where he wasn't liked much by the Muslims and was sent off to Mongolia.

In Mongolia, Vasili and his few followers started to preach Orthodoxy. Quite some Mongolians liked the religion, and it began to gain popularity. The ruler saw the Orthodox Christians as a threat to his power and expelled them along with the former Grand Prince. Vasili did not believe that he could overthrow the ruler, and so he obeyed, taking his followers further east, where his followers established a kingdom with him as the king. The new king loyally named the kingdom New Muscovy.

Soon after establishing the new kingdom, he died, and his son Ivan IV took over, who spread the kingdom across the Vasiliya Sea[1], and called the newly conquered areas Alyshka, before he too died, and his son Ivan V continued the conquest all the way down to Fodora Bay. He named the conquered areas Fodora, after the Fodora Bay[2], which in turn was named after his brother, Feudor.

Later, the New Muscovians came in touch again with the other Europeans during the European colonization of the Americas. Borders were set mostly peacefully between New Muscovy and the European colonizors, through a series of conventions.

Today, the Federal Kingdom of New Muscovy is the only place in the world where the Eastern Orthodox community accounts for more than 10% of the country's population. Eastern Orthodoxy is followed by about 85% of the population, though less than 40% claim to be religious. While the current constitution of the Kingdom guarantees freedom of religion for everyone, the government is required to support the Eastern Orthodox Church economically.

[1] The Bering Sea in OTL.

[2] The San Francisco Bay in OTL.


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The day Buddhism dies...

Cross-posting the Map in the MOTF Thread.

Chandragupta begins a different conquest of the Indian subcontinent, and conquers around that which he did OTL. Infact, most of his life proceeds OTL. However, his sons who follow him, are raised inherently Hindu [1]. Cascading butterflies lead to a Christian analogue (Habranism) arising from Carthage* and an Alternate migration period. This results in Habranist Maygars invading the Indian subcontinent.
Buddhism (Boothism ITTL, pronounced the same), remains a minor regional religion in Northern India, tolerated by most polities in the region. Habranism is outcompeting however, and Buddhists are finding fewer and fewer converts. Hinduism (Tsinduism ITTL), is also being threatened by Habranists from the North (Maygars) and the West (Seaborne traders from Arabia).

[1] POD


*Different Punic Wars

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Ok, for this round, I am going to vanish the Din-i-Ilahi, AKA the Path of Wisdom or, vulgarly, Akbarism. After all, if not for the wisdom of the Turkish sage, Akbar, rather than taking on the mantle of the Sufi Revelator or the Hindu Guru, might have, like Akhenaten, made himself a God-king, the centerpiece of his own religion: and like Atenism, the new religion would have perished within a generation [1], rather than expanding over three centuries to become the characteristic faith of northern India.

Without the Revelations of Akbar, the Mogul Empire would have remained a Muslim regime ruling over Hindu masses, slowly becoming more intolerant as conversion took place and Muslims made an increasing share of the population. Although the Moghul Empire in this form probably would not have lasted too long, and some Hindu revivals and independent states probably would arise, the basic dynamic of Muslim advance and Hindu retreat as the rule-bound, no-take backs Islamic faith outcompeted the, at the time, rather disorganized and multifarious polytheism of the Hindu masses. In the end, increasing pressures on the Hindu population would lead to an increased disregard of the prohibitions on sea travel, and a Hindu Diaspora would scatter around the rim of the Indian ocean and beyond, here and there carving out a state and perhaps later falling to other Muslim assaults or Christian European conquerors.

Although probably less technologically apt and less open to outside ideas than the Moghul Realm as it became OTL, military competition – Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Muslim - would drive technological progress to the extent that European colonialism would have no better opportunity for lodging a foothold in Northern India than OTL. The spread of technological and organizational advances to fellow Sunnis in the Ottoman Empire probably means that the Ottoman Empire does better than OTL, while the shaky later Iranian dynasties leads to the division of Iran between Sunni great powers, although a Shi’a reaction might in time drive foreign rulers from core Shi’a and Persian areas.

As OTL, European naval power and the local concerns of Indian states means that Europeans come to dominate in SE Asia and the Pacific. A major change is in China: OTL, the flow of new ideas between northern India and China has been seen by most historians as a major force behind the Qing intellectual revival, and some have spoken of a second great “Indian-Chinese exchange” comparable to that of the Buddhist in the early Middle Ages. Although Chinese followers of the Path of Wisdom remained a minority, it’s probably a good bet that without the Indian element, the Qing, a foreign dynasty with a need for legitimacy, would have been more conservative, more in-turned, like the later Ming before them. China’s encounter with Europeans was rocky enough OTL: given a China more rigid in its ancient certainties, less involved with the outside world, I can see breakdown, war, civil war, and eventually division into spheres of influence turning in time to colonial dominance, although due to the huge size of the country much of the interior remains largely no-man’s-land.

Nihon? Let’s just call it butterflies: I just wanted something different from the usual AH choices of totalitarian nuke-waggers or colonial partition.

India in time achieves some sort of balance of power between major Islamic states: it will probably be an unpleasant, Dominationist type of Islam, the conflict between modern notions of self-determination and the drive to convert the Hindu population leading to increasingly sharp repression. Looking now outward to a wider world, the Indian states will find themselves unpleasantly hemmed in by Christian states and colonial empires. (Yes, that is a greater Suristan. Sue me: I have always felt Suristan was the “almost made it” Islamic great power of OTL, so it will continue to show up in some form or other in a certain percentage of my maps).

Europe I mess up with the butterflies, although I do assume a unification of the German states as OTL, and throw in a (mostly) unified Italy for shits and giggles. Some sort of variant Great European War breaks out as technological and industrial advances outpace military understanding of the possibilities. . But without the Mughal Intervention, the war here continues, like the Pan-American wars of OTL, till a wide-spread wave of revolution puts an end to the fighting. (I suppose I am cheating a bit: it’s possible that ATL an American Great Power might take the role the Mughals did for one side or another). Taking advantage of the distraction of the European powers, the Islamic powers of India seize the colonies of weaker and/or revolution-torn European countries. We are left in 1923 with an Old World in worse shape than the Americas 1951 OTL, divided between shaky radical *Riccian regimes, alarmed reactionary regimes, and Islamic regimes espousing an unpleasant Dominationist version of Islam and clutching tight their new colonial booty…

Bruce

[1] Apologies, K!
 
POD: Christianity never manages to become a large religion and it never really spreads out of Israel.

The year is 689 AD. The Eastern Roman Empire (the Empires did split in this TL, but they both survive, as Pagan empires) is currently in quite a weak period. (Zoroastrian) Persia used this to capture Northern Syria. Many parts of the Empire have broken off, including Egypt and Rabbat Ammon. It doesn't look like they will be able to recapture these areas in the nearby future.
Damascus has been independent for a long time, previously a buffer zone between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persians. The Nabataeans have been independent since 429 AD, and they are an important power in the region, mainly because they control the trade routes. During the Roman rule, they became very Hellinized, and Greek is mostly used for writing, although the spoken language is Nabataean.

The kingdom of Israel has become independent a hundred years ago. It is a state consisting of Jews and Christians, both approximately 50%. They are both united against the Graeco-Roman Paganism. The country is growing in power, but also in wealth. Although not on bad terms with Egypt, Damascus and Rabbat Ammon, relations with Persia and the Romans are not that good, and the future is not without danger for the people of Israel.

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Lemon

Banned
Jesus is exiled instead of killed to Cyprus. It spreads quickly throughout the island. It fails to cement itself on the mainland very much. Mediterranean coatal cities have small minorities but that is all.

Eventually gains independence after the collapse of the Second Roman Republic in about 1000 AD. King is a supposed decendent of Jesus.

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This is my first Map contest entry. I hope thst in future ones my skill will improve:)
 
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