So what would the Middle East, Near East...

So what would the Middle East, Near East, and North Africa look like today if some pedophile (piss be upon him) never invented Islam 1500 years ago?

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Different, I think.

it would be byzantine territory

Better than what it is now

It would probably be the first world senpai

Fuck off

Christian Arab Immigrants tend to do better than Muslim Arab immigrants I think so there's that.
Almost any immigrant group not Muslim tends to do better Muslim ones it seems.

Did i trigger you Ahmed?

I imagine it'd be more sectarian, considering there's no unifying factor of being an Arabic speaker & Muslim. Either the Byzantines or Persians would've gained a foothold and in their inevitable collapse, a power vacuum like the one the Ottomans left in our timeline; except now you just have a fuckton of pissed off little groups as opposed to a handful of big ones.

Less spillover into the West, I'd imagine however

For one thing, Muhammad wouldn't wasn't even born 1500 years ago, nor did he invent Islam anymore than Jesus invented Christianity.

It would look much the same, give or take a few civil wars, as the religion, culture, or language of a region doesn't exactly change the changes in population, rainfall, climate, global trade, and mass migration and invasion of nomads.

>Less spillover into the West, I'd imagine however
Unless the West never develops modern transportation technology, liberal democracy, and the Internet, spillover would be inevitable.

I was referring to terror attacks. With no real unifying ideology, there'd be no reason for Karim to, in his eyes, stick up for some region he's never seen. His issue would be with the rival ethnicities in the region, probably killing other local immigrants if anything

Refugees would still be an issue because the West never learns, its foreign policy the epitome of madness

Christianity dominates the region. A new sect arises to fuel the rivalry between Europe and MENA. So probably not too much different.

It might look worse. After Justinian's Plague population in the Near East practically collapsed, and agriculture, already in decline from its Bronze Age height in the region, would further decline no matter what with less rainfall.

From that point on the region depended heavily on global trade to make up for its falling population and production, but without the cultural expansion of the Caliphate that trade might never take off like it did.

>With no real unifying ideology, there'd be no reason for Karim to, in his eyes, stick up for some region he's never seen.

Unless this parallel universe also never developed political ideology, that doesn't seem likely. You'd just replace Islamism with any other -ism (like what actually happened but in reverse). Besides, this doesn't seem to me an argument why the Middle East would be better or worse if its political violence was based on something other than Islam, only that it wouldn't be as troublesome for the West to deal with as the issue compounds itself with Muslim immigrants of any ethnicity. And with the Internet steadily forming international communities, I suspect at best we'd simply postpone this kind of virulent thinking for about a few decades.

The modern middle east would probably look a lot more like modern central Asia.

Iran would probably still be a major power and Anatolia would still hold a power whether it be an immigrant empire like Turkey, a ressurgent Greece, or even an old ass Byzantium.

North Africa would most definetly be the exact same.

I think the real difference would be in India and Europe.

It's arguable how much Islam changes a person, but resistance to Islam has definetly shaped these regions drastically.

A delayed scientific revolution in Europe is a definite possibility and who knows what else.

I can't speak for what a Muslim free India would look like, but it'd definetly be different.

This. Religion doesn't change a people so much as it changes the relationship between a people and others. In many ways Sassanid Persia or Byzantine Egypt wasn't all that different from Samanid Persia or Tulunid Egypt, but India's relationship with Central Asia and Western Europe's relationship with the Eastern Mediterranean definitely changed.

Better question:

What would those place be, if the West did not intervene againist progresive movements (before, since and mostly after WW2) that would eventually lead to the reforming of the Islamic faith?

Probably like Turkey before Islamism.

>So what would the Middle East, Near East look like today if some pedophile (piss be upon him) never invented Islam 1500 years ago?

TURKICED.

*throat singing intensifies*
*Burned cities and pyramid heads intensifies*
*Slave trade*
*Chinese culture spreads Westward carried by Central Asians*

I'm going to guess that some part of it would have been unified by someone else

We'd have a bunch of Arab Communists still bombing the US LoL

That actually is possible given how devolopments in the Mid East both Political/Geopopitics/cultural/ trade wise played a massive role in Western Politics
One could even argue The west might look Completely different in every way possible in such a Scenario

>more sectarian, considering there's no unifying factor of being an Arabic speaker & Muslim
What if in the absence of islam the Coptic Orthodoxy had grown into the powerhouse of middle east and North Africa like the Greek orthodoxy eastern Europe and Russia or Roman Catholicism in central Europe?

Weren't Nomads only in the middle east in the first place BECAUSE of Islam?

>Slave trade
Because there was none of that with muslims, am I right?

Nope.jpg.

Central Asia was fuck overpopulated in the 600s AD and China was having non of their shit, so they were all moving westwards. Islam just expedited the process by buying loads of them as military slaves.

The Central Asian (Chinky version) themselves were Buddhists, Animists, or even Nestorian Christians.

Arabs would still be inheriting their mothers and selling them or deciding to keep them as their wives
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_Arabia

You have several turkic invasions into the middle east before islam. Byzantines allied with the turks to fight against the Sassanids. Before that you have the hephtalites who were probably not turkic at all but were a nomadic empire like the turks. And before that you got the kushans who had nomadic origins too.

In general, if the power in Iran was weak the nomads of the north-east invaded the middle east. A full scale invasion (instead of raids) by the arabs was the bizarro event and was never repeated.

>Islam just expedited the process by buying loads of them as military slaves.
I think the Abbasids dulled the process really. By buying loads of Turkic slaves and training them in military administration they ended up creating a more capable buffer to the Turkic migrations of the 10th and 11th centuries. The Ghulam governors would more effectively control the migrant tribes and see them assimilated into Iran and Mesopotamia, causing more traditional tribes into Anatolia (part of what led to Manzikert).

It's only with the Mongols who just steamrolled the whole place that steppe migrations reached a whole new scale.

Well I was talking of Islamdom in General, and the great Seljuq invasion was literally caused by a large confederacy of Steppenigs united by Islam getting involved in Abbasid Politics.

Seljuqs were persianized turkmen

Yes, but the Seljuks invaded on Abbasid terms rather than their own. It's like the difference between the Franks and Goths versus the Huns. Steppe migration was inevitable for reasons beyond anyone's control, but the result can either be an acculturated incorporation of a confederation into local politics, as the Seljuks in Iran, Syria, and even Anatolia right after Manzikert, or something uncontrolled altogether.