Islam Nonexistant - What Religious Effects?

[Leo Caesius]

But Islam is also a Meospotamiam and Persian civilisation, and it's centre of gravity has often been on the fertile crescent. The Abbasids never even tried to capture Constantinople.

How did Constantinople somehow become more "Mediterranean" than Syria and Egypt? What does Constantinople have to do with the question of how "Mediterranean" classical Islamic civilization was? Geez.

I did qualify my statement of backwater but I stress again the rise of centrifugal forces in the Mediterranean from the 8th century onwards, suggesting that this is not core territory.

Well, I disagree. Strongly. You're acting as if the Islamic west never existed. What about the Fatimids? Cordoba?

Looking at trade also the Muslims were much less Mediterranean focussed -Islamic coins and items ended up in England via Russia and Scandinavia for example. This says a lot about the role of the Vikings but also shows how Muslims travelled in a range of directions, not just through the Med.

I fail to see how this indicates that the Mediterranean was not a "core territory". We find Sarmatian influences in Roman Britain as well; does that mean that the Mediterranean was not a "core territory" for the Roman Empire?

In the conquered territories a change of dominant religion, a dramatic change of script and steady but substantial change of administrative practices all represent major changes. In architecture and material culture there is perhaps more evolution.

These are all rather superficial, I'm afraid. For starters, in the area of religion, for the majority of the people affected it was merely a case of rule by one group of heretics being replaced by the rule of another group of heretics - with the notable exception that this new group of heretics offered the population a role in society (as opposed to their usual role, which was "outlaw"). Second class status, yes, but at least it was codified recognition and some degree of protection.

As far as script - SCRIPT? Are you serious? Could you possibly find something more superficial? For starters, even when they shifted to Arabic, centuries later, most non-Muslim groups continued to use their script (giving rise to varieties of Middle Arabic dialects written in the Coptic, Syriac, or Hebrew script). I will accept that the "lingua franca" shifted from Greek to Arabic, but given that the territories formerly governed from Constantinople and now governed from Damascus, Baghdad, or Cairo were home to speakers of a variety of Afroasiatic languages such as Coptic, Berber, and Aramaic, and not Indo-European ones, for the most part, I do not see this as an especially dramatic shift. For starters, Aramaic and Punic, which are close sisters to Arabic, were still spoken in many of these regions, and I question the extent to which Greek was controlled by the populations in question.

As far as architecture and material culture, which was my original focus in all of this (my first degree was in Late Roman and Early Byzantine Art History and Archaeology), this is in fact the area in which you find the MOST continuity. Evolution is quite another matter - you seriously don't believe that the Byzantines never evolved, do you? Oh dear.

I would be tempted to say there are larger changes in the unconquered territories, Asia Minor suffers complete urban destruction thanks to Arab raiding and during the 8th century even Constantinople was pretty deserted. Arab raiding also takes its toll on south-west Europe, but is only one of several factors.

There we go again with the anachronisms. To this I can only respond that you're acting as if history begins in 622 CE. What about the Persians? Did I just dream of Khosrau II's invasions on the eve of Islam?

How much of these raids can be attributed directly to Islam and how much can be attributed to the complete breakdown of law, order, and control that paved the way for Islam's conquest of the region? And I still maintain that to speak of "Arab" raids in southwest Europe is anachronistic, particularly when we're talking about the sea. The conquest of Spain could not have been accomplished without the Berbers, although I suppose some people might anachronistically consider Muslim Syrians, Copts, and Berbers to all be just "Arabs".

And one small thing - Justinian spoke Latin not Greek.

Thank you for making this one small concession to fact in this discussion. I shall cherish it.

 

[Wozza]

How did Constantinople somehow become more "Mediterranean" than Syria and Egypt? What does Constantinople have to do with the question of how "Mediterranean" classical Islamic civilization was? Geez..

It's clearly more Mediterranean even than Damascus, let alone Baghdad. You have completely ignored the substance of my points, which is about where the focus of the Ummayad and Abbasis Caliphates actually was.

Well, I disagree. Strongly. You're acting as if the Islamic west never existed. What about the Fatimids? Cordoba?

I am not disputing the existence of an Islamic West, merely disputing its importance within such a vast civilisation.

I fail to see how this indicates that the Mediterranean was not a "core territory". We find Sarmatian influences in Roman Britain as well; does that mean that the Mediterranean was not a "core territory" for the Roman Empire?

It indicates that the Mediterranean did not have the central importance it did to Roman civilization. I fail to see how this can really be disputed. I am not disputing that Islam was an important part of Mediterranean history or that the Mediterranean plays a role in Islamic history. Merely its central importance.

These are all rather superficial, I'm afraid. For starters, in the area of religion, for the majority of the people affected it was merely a case of rule by one group of heretics being replaced by the rule of another group of heretics - with the notable exception that this new group of heretics offered the population a role in society (as opposed to their usual role, which was "outlaw"). Second class status, yes, but at least it was codified recognition and some degree of protection.

Heretics for some, there were still Orthodox communities in Syria and Egypt. Also you are painting a highly distorted picture, the religious and secular authorities in Constantinople were authorities that local leaders could seek to influence, and arguably with the attempt to create monotheletism did so. This is an entirely different sort of relationship to that with Muslim rulers. You are starting to make some gross simplifications here.

As far as script - SCRIPT? Are you serious? Could you possibly find something more superficial? For starters, even when they shifted to Arabic, centuries later, most non-Muslim groups continued to use their script (giving rise to varieties of Middle Arabic dialects written in the Coptic, Syriac, or Hebrew script). I will accept that the "lingua franca" shifted from Greek to Arabic, but given that the territories formerly governed from Constantinople and now governed from Damascus, Baghdad, or Cairo were home to speakers of a variety of Afroasiatic languages such as Coptic, Berber, and Aramaic, and not Indo-European ones, for the most part, I do not see this as an especially dramatic shift. For starters, Aramaic and Punic, which are close sisters to Arabic, were still spoken in many of these regions, and I question the extent to which Greek was controlled by the populations in question.?

Have you ever been anywere tht you could not read the script? And in your case I do not really mean that rhetorically. The term people almost always use is "culture shock."

As far as architecture and material culture, which was my original focus in all of this (my first degree was in Late Roman and Early Byzantine Art History and Archaeology), this is in fact the area in which you find the MOST continuity. Evolution is quite another matter - you seriously don't believe that the Byzantines never evolved, do you? Oh dear.

This is what I said.

There we go again with the anachronisms. To this I can only respond that you're acting as if history begins in 622 CE. What about the Persians? Did I just dream of Khosrau II's invasions on the eve of Islam?

How much of these raids can be attributed directly to Islam and how much can be attributed to the complete breakdown of law, order, and control that paved the way for Islam's conquest of the region? And I still maintain that to speak of "Arab" raids in southwest Europe is anachronistic, particularly when we're talking about the sea. The conquest of Spain could not have been accomplished without the Berbers, although I suppose some people might anachronistically consider Muslim Syrians, Copts, and Berbers to all be just "Arabs"..

Well, we don't have enough evidence to say when urban decline began at what rate. But what do you think has more of an effect? A single raid followed by a decade of war on the borders or two centuries of continuous raiding of Asia Minor? You are completely offbase on this, urban civilization in Asia Minor/Anatolia recovered quite rapidly after the Byzantine victories from the 9th century onwards, and without the Arab conquests the region would have rapidly recovered from the Byzantine-Persian wars.

The raids were deeply connected with Islam in the sense that religion was used as a justification for an essentially materialistic enterprise. However every year jihadis would travel from Egypt and Mesopotamia to take part in the autumn raiding season. Muslim communities such as Melitene existed expressly for this purpose.


Again in south-west Europe you are ignoring the long-term effects into the 8th and 9th centuries - the former in particular being the really dark part of the dark ages.

Thank you for making this one small concession to fact in this discussion. I shall cherish it.

I look forward to you responding in kind.

 

[Dan1988]

Have you ever been anywere tht you could not read the script?

Yes. But I eventually learned.

 

[Leo Caesius]

It's clearly more Mediterranean even than Damascus, let alone Baghdad. You have completely ignored the substance of my points, which is about where the focus of the Ummayad and Abbasis Caliphates actually was.

The focus of the Umayyad Caliphate was Syria and, after that, Spain. I fail to see how it wasn't Mediterranean. Furthermore, you're using some very strange definition of "Mediterranean" if you believe that Constantinople was more "Mediterranean" than Damascus. I believe that the term you're looking for is "European" which is not synonymous with "Mediterranean".

In any case, with regard to material culture and architecture, you'd probably be surprised to learn what scholars of Middle Byzantine architecture consider to be the finest example of that oeuvre from the 7th century.

I am not disputing the existence of an Islamic West, merely disputing its importance within such a vast civilisation.

Certainly if you'd ever read Ibn Khaldun you would not be making such a statement. It seems to me that the problem with you is that you're just not interested in North Africa, so you'd rather pretend that it was peripheral and unimportant. That is severely problematic.

It indicates that the Mediterranean did not have the central importance it did to Roman civilization. I fail to see how this can really be disputed. I am not disputing that Islam was an important part of Mediterranean history or that the Mediterranean plays a role in Islamic history. Merely its central importance.

If you were willing to restrict the discussion to the Abbassids, then I might be willing to meet you halfway here. But you're talking about Islamic civilization as a whole. The Umayyads were indisputably oriented towards the Mediterranean, as were the Fatimids, and the Ottomans, and just about every other dynasty governing the present-day Arab world other than the Abbassids. I admit that the Abbassids are very interesting and that they were primarily (although not exclusively) oriented towards the east, but they were not the whole of Islamic civilization.

You are starting to make some gross simplifications here.

Pot, Kettle, Black.

Have you ever been anywere tht you could not read the script? And in your case I do not really mean that rhetorically. The term people almost always use is "culture shock."

Tell me, Wozza, what do you imagine the literacy rates to have been in the Mediterranean world during this period? For men and women. Furthermore, you're coming at this from a literate perspective. You're used to reading something every day and seeing conspicuous labels everywhere. I'll grant you that there were public inscriptions (albeit made largely for the benefit of rulers rather than the general public) but the Arabs didn't go about changing the street signs and the warning labels on all products because these things didn't exist then - and if you were a Jew, a Copt, a Syrian, or a member of any other group you would continue using your native tongue without much regard to what the rulers were using.

I'll grant you that some (particularly converts to Islam) would have learned Arabic, but knowledge of Arabic, particularly of reading and writing Arabic, wouldn't be widespread for generations to come after the conquest. And while the manuscript finds from Egypt are quite interesting in what they have to say about popular knowledge of Greek, the extent to which Greek was a popular language in the Orient is demonstrated by the rapidity with which it disappears after the Islamic conquests.

Well, we don't have enough evidence to say when urban decline began at what rate.

In North Africa and Syria I can say with some certainty that it began long, long before the Arabs showed up. I'm less familiar with the data for Anatolia but I wouldn't be surprised if the same were the case.

You are completely offbase on this, urban civilization in Asia Minor/Anatolia recovered quite rapidly after the Byzantine victories from the 9th century onwards, and without the Arab conquests the region would have rapidly recovered from the Byzantine-Persian wars.

Perhaps I'm "offbase" for Anatolia - I willingly acknowledge that I'm not on certain ground here - but for North Africa I'm sticking to my guns. The main reason why I interjected myself into this conversation was Midgard's assertion that North Africa would have remained part of a "Mediterranean" civilization had Islam never showed up, by which he probably means European or more specifically Byzantine, whereas I'm questioning the degree to which it pertained to either of those two categories, and the degree to which we can exclude Islam from "Mediterraneanness".

You and Midgard seem to be laboring under the delusion that Islam erupted from Arabia completely pure from any foreign influences, destroyed everything in their path, slaughtered all the populations they encountered, repopulated the region with Arabs, and built a new civilization from scratch. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The raids were deeply connected with Islam in the sense that religion was used as a justification for an essentially materialistic enterprise. However every year jihadis would travel from Egypt and Mesopotamia to take part in the autumn raiding season. Muslim communities such as Melitene existed expressly for this purpose.

I note that you use the phrase "Muslim community" rather than "Arab community". Finally we're beginning to distance ourselves from these horrible anachronisms.

Was Melitene a "Muslim community" or was it a base for raids? In any case, we were initially talking about North Africa and the Western Mediterranean, where the Arab presence was negligible and there was a longstanding pirate population that historically tended to get out of hand as soon as the authority that controlled the region broke down.

I look forward to you responding in kind.

 

[Dan1988]

Leo, would you mind answering this question, please?

Just a small question: how would a "no Islam" scenario affect the Persian language?

 

[Leo Caesius]

Part of the problem that I always encounter about these discussions about Islam is the widespread ignorance about the period of Late Antiquity. People simply are not interested in it. They are interested in the classical civilizations, such as the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the civilizations of Mesopotamia. They automatically assume that the Byzantines were the inheritors to the former two (a problematic assumption) and that the latter three were completely eradicated by the Muslims (also problematic), completely ignoring everything that occurred meanwhile.

If you actually take the trouble to examine the period of Late Antiquity, seriously, you'll come to appreciate not only the differences between the Byzantines and their classical predecessors, but also the continuity between the classical civilizations and ALL of the states that succeeded them.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Leo, would you mind answering this question, please?

Obviously there would be less Arabic. At the same time, the "truth language" of the Persians at the time was not pure Persian a la Ferdowsi, it was Pahlavi - which is Middle Persian written in the Aramaic script with plentiful Aramaic expressions. Scholars debate the extent to which these expressions were actually spoken or even analyzed as Aramaic. My personal belief is that they were the exact analogue of Latin and Greek expressions in English, which are especially prevalent in certain technical jargons.

So, the common tongue of the Persian-speaking parts of Iran would probably have been pure Persian a la Ferdowsi, but unwritten, whereas the written idiom would have remained heavily peppered with Aramaic. These terms might have eventually filtered down into the common language as Arabic eventually did. Does that answer your question?

 

[Dan1988]

Does that answer your question?

Yes, that does, very much. I'm assuming that Pahlavi is not similar to Avestan, right?

 

[Leo Caesius]

Yes, that does, very much. I'm assuming that Pahlavi is not similar to Avestan, right?

Avestan is written with a modified, fully phonetic version of the Pahlavi script, but it couldn't be more different linguistically. It is a conservative, highly synthetic language (similar to Sanskrit), whereas Pahlavi is an innovative, analytical or isolating language (similar to modern Persian). The former predates the bifurcation into East Iranian (Pashtu, Ossetian, etc) and West Iranian (Kurdish, Persian, etc.) but is closer in some respects to the East Iranian languages, whereas the latter is decidedly West Iranian.

 

[Keenir]

we should have said this earlier: saying "what if no Islam? discuss." is like saying "what if no Germanies/Germanics? discuss." it's too big a question, and too general.

I would argue that Christinanity contains the basic elements for the start of democracy!

in what?

"render unto caesar" isn't exactly advocating chosing your ruler.

 

[Keenir]

As for the mediterrean question, it's without doubt that the roman empire had all his economic, political and cultural centers along the shores of the sea (Keenir, the regions you named were frontiers).

oh.

I thought for sure that at least Iberia and Gaul were non-frontiers.

thanks for the correction.

 

[Keenir]

And of course east of the Persians you have places where buddhism has already spread, ITTL it won't be rooted out by the muslims.

um, exactly where have OTL Muslims rooted out Buddhism? Indonesia? India?

 

[Leo Caesius]

um, exactly where have OTL Muslims rooted out Buddhism? Indonesia? India?

Perhaps he's thinking of the Silk Road, where there was a strong Buddhist presence, at least until the Mongols showed up. Somehow I doubt that he was thinking of them specifically, though.

 

[Fatal Wit]

I think that "Christianity" would have been overwhelmingly dominant.

However, their is every chance that Christianity might start to splinter into multiple "religions", as it lacks a convenient threat to maintain a sense of identity.

In regards to Zoroastrianism- my understanding of it is that it was a very state-based religion. Thus it would more likely then not suffer a severe decline once the Sassanid state inevitably comes to an end-unless another Zoroastrian state takes its place. I'm not sure how likely it is that Zoroastrianism can remain the dominant religion anywhere up until present day, but if the Sassanids last a while longer it might at least remain a more significant minority religion.

Finally, I don't understand why the Arabs needed Islam to unify. The Mongols didn't, after all. Its just that any area they conquered would not be inflenced culturally by them.

 

[Keenir]

Finally, I don't understand why the Arabs needed Islam to unify. The Mongols didn't, after all. Its just that any area they conquered would not be inflenced culturally by them.

well, the Mongols got a Great Man {of History} to unite them....Islam got both a Great Man and a New Religion in a single package.

hm...starting a new thread, as your question deserves it.

 

[Cornelius]

I thought for sure that at least Iberia and Gaul were non-frontiers.
thanks for the correction.

Actually you talked about Britain, northern Gaul and Germany, not Iberia...

Anyway, I'd like to know your exact definition of "mediterrean civilization". I think that could help us to clear the ground.

 

[Keenir]

Actually you talked about Britain, northern Gaul and Germany, not Iberia...

thought I did. sorry.

Anyway, I'd like to know your exact definition of "mediterrean civilization". I think that could help us to clear the ground.

well, I didn't mention "Mediterrean civilization", so I thought what was meant was along the lines of "a civilization restricted - by chance or by design - to the shores and waters of the Mediterrean".

...which would be very tough to accomplish. after all, even Carthage expanded inland when it could (ie Iberia)

 

[Adamanteus]

In OTL, Mohammed developed and spread the religion we now know today as Islam. However, what if he had been removed from the scene by one of the rival Meccan tribes who were opposed to his teachings? What kind of world would have developed in the absence of the Islamic eruption that transformed the Middle East in the decades to come? Would Christianity have continued to hold sway in the area? Zoroastrianism? Judaism?Gnosticism? Hinduism out of the east? What might become of these religions and the cultures related to them? How might the rest of the world been affected by no Crusades, no bloody conquests (at least none from Islamic armies or vengeful Christian ones anyway) and no mass conversions?

Have at it!

Without Islam, Zoroastrianism would replace some of Islam's influence. Christianity would likely spread throughout Africa, while Zoroastrianism would remain straddled between Mesopotamia and India.

It would have far reaching political effects. The (Eastern) Roman Empire would survive far longer, possibly into modern times, in some form, as well as the Persian.

 

[Fatal Wit]

The (Eastern) Roman Empire would survive far longer, possibly into modern times, in some form, as well as the Persian.

I doubt it- the Byzantines may have a chance to last until present day, but I don't see how Sassanid Persia can escpae some steppe tribe or other knocking them over. The real question is whether Zoroastrianism can survive as the primary religion of the area without a state patronizing and imposing it.

 

[Cornelius]

I asked for a definition for mediterrean civilization because it seemed to have become the true argument of the thread .

My definition would be of a civilization, roman-hellenistic, born from the merging of the various cultures who had actually lived and prospered around the mediterrean basin (especially the eastern part).
I wouldn't be so strict on the definition of mediterrean of the late antiquity/early middle age civilization, though. There was never a true separation between the middle east cultures in those times and the contaminations were frequent. For example, i wouldn't define the persian a mediterrean culture, but the proskynesis practiced at Byzantium was originally a persian custom.