Islam

>they'd all be speaking some form of Persian and not Arabic.
I doubt that considering the lingua franca back then dating back to the Achaemenids was Aramaic.
Hell, the written language the Persians used was with the Aramaic alphabet.

Would argue for harm.

Unlike Europe which was an unstable shithole that needed christianity, Middle east had stable states that could develop without Islam. Economically, Islams greatest benefit is unleashing stored up capital but this would have happened in the inevitable dynasty change anyway.

>What would happen if they stayed christian

Look at Cyprus. They're hellenized levantines

>What would happen if they stayed christian if Islam wasn't so successful at spreading?
Take a look at Malta, who are Catholic pre-islamic Arabic peoples.

Eastern Roman Empire would still be around so the middle east would probably be more advanced, civilized, and peaceful. Europe would probably be at each other's throats more without an evil to unite them.

Middle East is a special kind of place, anyway.
Had Islam not gotten there, they would have most likeley split half and half into the Asian and African parts and fought anyway.

The thing has been way more successful in the Orient, what with being the biggest religion in Asia and the countries under it only benefitting from the unification nowadays with no goat-fucking anarchists to blow themselves up in the name of Abrahamic God.

HARM

Islam clearly held back the middle east and made it backwards.

al Ghazali effectively intellectually outlawed rational inquiry and philosophical thought about theology which kept islam and by extension islamic society in its primitive state and greatly hindered the civic and social advances and legal advances in society that happened in europe. And infact the middle east should have had a greater head start on europe in this area since they had ibn Khaldun who was let's say 700 years ahead of europe in sociological understanding, plus they had greater access to hellenistic philosophical heritage earlier than many parts of northern europe, but al ghazali shut that all down with "muh divine and eternal koran, muh intuition, muh revelation, you should take everything from the self evident divinity of the koran and the revelation it causes , and not trust philosophy and rationality in thinking about theology".

Islamic calligraphers successfully boycotted printing presses from printing in arabic through the ottoman empire from the 1400s until like the late 1700s, by which point there had been 10s of thousands of printing presses in europe for 200 years " . They did it because "muh holy language of the koran it is a sin to have a machine do it , only calligraphy". For hundres of years the only printing presses in the ottoman empire were in synagogues and monasteries printing in hebrew, greek and armenian.

so yeah islam FUCKED the intellectual development of the middle east.

And the one kind of early islam which would not have fucked the middle east and which had a some kind of rationalism to it , the mutazillites, are basically considered heretics and blasphemers by contemporary, mainstream, sunni islam.

this is organised, orderly, cooperative east asian culture managing to shine and develop despite islam.

>Did Islam do more good or harm for the Middle East
It depends on what perspective you're looking at it through

>What would have happened...
Pointless to speculate; everything everyone here is saying is stupid conjecture

You just started this thread so that you could see people bash Islam; you're all unbelievably transparent.

except it's historical fact that the ottoman empire outlawed the printing press from being made in arabic in the ottoman empire because of objections by islamic scholars who thought calligraphy should be done by hand.

No, it is a place which would either submit to the local juggernauts had they remained easily-influencable blobs of natives with shamanism instead of a group of people sharing a common religion opposed to Confucianism or Hinduism.

Bahrain also has a few, being the only Arab country with a pre-Islamic temple

Obviously Islam has held back progress, just like every other factor conceivable has. Despite what contrarians say on this board, the Catholic Church also held back progress in Europe in many ways.

Islam did some good for the middle east, just as it did some bad. It's utterly pointless to try and speculate as to what might have been if Islam had never risen.

>Printing press
As I said, an example f something bad. Fortunately, Ottoman empire did not ban the use of the printing press completely, and books were published in many other scripts such as Latin, Armenian, Hebrew, etc. Secular works were allowed to be published in Arabic by the 18th century.

nah east asians are more easily predisposed towards orderly behaviour. You can see this whereever their diaspora are and almost whatever part of east asia they were originally from.

koreans, japanese, chinese, malaysians, viets, thais, they all share this trait without huge variation.
Islam has nothing to do with it.
if hindu mssionaries or christian missionaries had swept south east asia by storm as well, there would be insignificant difference to their current healthy economic development.

east asians in southeast asia are doing pretty well despite islam

>be zoroastrian
>worship fire (as a symbol of ahura mazda)
>build fuckawesome fire temples and stuff
>be pretty chill and tolerant, have other religions and ethnicities in nation and get along fine
>enter islam
>"speak arabic or die"
>"become muslim or die"
>all the art and literature gets destroyed by burkadurkashits
>now forced to worship a child raping, camel fucking, incestuous warlord instead of wickedcool fire
>your language almost goes extinct, is saved by some poet 400 years later
>now the women are essentially slaves and every non-muslim and non-arab is literally a slave
>no more /comfy/ fire temples

Thanks islam.

Think of it this way. Both Persia AND the Eastern Roman Empire were fighting against Islam. Imagine how bad something has to be for two bitter enemies to agree that it's worse than anything the other guy ever did to them.

Islam is the virus, .338 is the cure.

At the start it did great things for the middle east, but after the Mongols raped Baghdad, it just started to make things worse for the middle east

>stayed Christian
u wot? The pre-Islamic Middle East was extremely religiously diverse, most people (especially the Bedouins who were the first Muslims) practiced some kind of paganism.

Depends on your perspective.
The Romans had shattered the Sassanians' power after a decades long, extremely brutal war. Had the Arabs not taken advantage, had there been no Muhammad to unite them, or an Abu Bakr to bind them together under one dogma, then most people in the Middle East would hate Romans as much as they seem to hate Turks.

I think that without Islam, we'd all know Heraklios' name, and /int/ would whinge about dirty greekroaches flooding Europe with Syrian monophysites.

Did a Muslim rape your mother or something, get the fuck out to

not so much Islam itself, but U.S. and British imperialism that fucked them up

What does anti-intellectualism have to do with the mongol invasions? They weren't nearly as backwards before.

Not that user, but I figure he meant that once they lost the last vestiges of centralisation they clung to it easily went into a freefall rather than pick itself up like Europe did after the fall of the Western Empire

Isnt it strange that Zorastrianism and other pagan beliefs in mesoptoamia actually survived under Islam into modern times whilst Christianity wholly ended Paganism in Europe

No, the Ottoman Empire and basically every nation in he Middle East was struggling to keep up with Europe because Islam doesn't lend itself well to innovation.