Serious question, what would the world religions look like with if Islam hadn't risen...

>Yet it survived
Under Islam, which has a history of that. Would a Christianized Persia allow the same given what a Christianized Rome did to Latin Paganism?

that would require either full conquest or aggressive missionary work and the Byzantines were in no position to start another war

If the Turks convert it might bring about a religious revival of Zoroastrianism, they seemed to have a knack for getting into leadership positions.

Instead of an Arab conquest you might see a Turkic one, that might even spread to Christian territories, also exhausted with war with the Sassanids.
But I do think no more Sassanid Empire and something else would replace it, but I'm not so sure Christianization would come quickly or totally.

Why do we always forget about the Manichaeans? If anything, it, rather than Nestorian Christianity, would be the natural successor to Zoroastrianism in Greater Iran.

Something like this?

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Christianity was already fast spreading in Iran, while the reverse could not be said of Zoroastrianism in Rome. It doesn't seem to have had much of a ground game when it came to proselytizing. Add to that the plague and civil war and Persia was ripe for grassroots Christianity.

Zoroastrian Turks also sounds absurd given the place they had in Persian mythos. They'd sooner convert to Christianity which they seemed to have done in large numbers historically.

Turks would likely just convert to Christianity themselves. The Mongols themselves practically did even without ruling any sedentary Christian populations, if the Turks migrated into a rapidly Christianizing Persia they too would’ve converted.

Likely not, since Islamic tolerance was born from necessity. Islam spread because the natives were conquered by Arabs and gradually Islamified and often Arabized over a period of centuries, whereas Christianity spread mostly grassroots, especially early on. A Persia that had Christianized of its own accord would have no reason to be tolerant to Zoroastrianism like the invading Muslims sort of were (but not really, since they also viciously persecuted it).

>nordism
>what are you?
>"Im a Nordist"

I wonder what a Christian Mongol Horde would be like..

>Looking for a serious answer and not /pol/ shit.
I too am often angered by truth

There would probably be a third church or series of churches separate from either Orthodox or Roman Catholic control. The plagues and migrations in North Africa and Middle East had changed demographics greatly even before Islam came into the picture, and its doubtful the elites of Egypt and Mesopotamia would remain loyal to Constantinople given the continuing violence between them.

The world religions would still be mostly Christian. Islam was just an (anti-trinitarian) branch of the Christ movement that happened to be centred in Mecca. The only real question is what the world would be like if Christ never existed, and I don't think anyone can answer that.

Like the Mongol Horde. They really didn't give any fucks about religion. Chingis had a Christian mother.

Can you imagine the colonial era if Islam never existed? MENA people would feel a lot less alien if they were majority Christian too. They wouldn't even have been Arabized . Wow.

>tfw West Eurasia would have been almost entirely Christian
Islam was a mistake, bros.

>donatist north and west africa
>jewish russia
>nordic paganism dominating northern europe
even for alternate history this is absolutely retarded

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I know, right? Egyptian would even still exist as a spoken language, and all the diverse range of Western Semitic languages that got obliterated by Arabic

Maybe a Christian North Africa and Levant.
Hindu Pakistan and Afghanistan

God willed it you fag

Give a source, i would actually be pretty surprised if cristianity had spread that far

I mean Zoroastrianism "survived." There are no more than 200,000 Zoroastrians worldwide. That's much fewer than the number of so-called neo-pagans. It's possible that some kind of religion based on the Zoroastrian tradition would have emerged and endured (analogous to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity) but it does seem that Persia was due for a religious shake-up.

>i would actually be pretty surprised if cristianity had spread that far

Nestorianism you top brainlet

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One of the Great Khan's wives was Christian, and she convinced him to spare the Christian populace of Baghdad when it was burned to the ground

Whoever made that map is either 13 or is definitely going to fail in life.

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Oh fucking please, it was a very real possibility even up until that retard Nasser introduced his Pan-Arab autism even though Egyptians are not Arabs, that Egyptian would be reintroduced as the language of Egypt.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaonism

What Semitic languages did Arabic obliterate? Aramaic was the big language-obliterator already, and that's the only Semitic language that I am aware had declined somewhat from Arabic.

Except that already happened. Several travellers wrote about the Christians speaking the pre-Arab Empire language of Aramaic, starting right when (a) they lost independence which they had in parts of the Hakkari province of Turkey and (b) the large group of them near Mosul became Roman Catholic. Both in the early-mid 19th century. This group would've been more alien than others that hypothetically could've remained non-Arab anyway, as they are farther from the Mediterranean and in very remote areas which were not explored by Westerners before the 19th or 20th century, and also practiced "Nestorianism". An isolated group of at least 10K Aramaic/Syriac-speaking Christians also lives in the mountains outside Damascus.

Any discussion of how 'alien' these peoples are from the West is complicated by their settlement in large numbers in the West and in Europe in the last century.

There was a bishop of Beijing in the 1300s.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Beijing

And that's completely irrelevant to Genghis's ancestors being Christians. This, however, is not.

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>looking for opinions that only conform to my opinions

Ever heard of ""Great"" ""October""" ""Socialist"" ""Revolution"" dumbass?

arabic nearly replaced egyptian and berber too. copts and syriacs were very well integrated in the western sphere at least in way of people like john of damascus and augustine of hippo

But I'm pretty sure those aren't Semitic languages.

>at least in way of people like john of damascus and augustine of hippo

Please explain.

Islamic scholars are primarily responsible for recording Aristotle and a few other major greek thinkers, following the collapse of Rome.
Supposing Byzantium survived, do you think we'd still have those documents? Or if we have no muslims, would we also have no aristotle?

>But I'm pretty sure those aren't Semitic languages.
I know but I bring up examples of other languages that arabic mostly replaced

>Please explain.
the ones I mentioned were christians who heavily influenced or are important to western culture and peoples which to me suggests that near easterners back then certainly weren't alien.

But Augustine spoke Latin and Northwest Africa isn't near Eastern. The 'cultural borders' weren't the same as the Crusader era.

On the other hand, he converted from Manicheism, another eastern faith, to another one, so even if he was Western himself there's still obviously eastern influence so your point stands.

Christians did all the translating

Central Asia becomes Buddhist. The Chinese were already making some inroads there, until they were defeated by the Arabs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas

Without the Muslim conquests, Chinese influence there would grow.

Most of the Middle East would probably remain Christian, but Christianity would be more fragmented. The Eastern Church was already quite fractured (Miaphysites, Monophysites, Nestorians etc.) and was prone to splits and heresies.

>why do you think so many persians converted to islam so quickly?
the threat of death?

It is indeed true that Muslims studied and propagated these classical thinkers, but they did not possess the only copies. It would have just taken longer for someone else to rediscover them.

i know but he was born an african who spoken latin which shows how close they were to the west. something not possible is the post islamic mena.

*in the post

They were not the sole preservers of Aristotle, just the ones who transferred his works to western Europe. Byzantium had access to all that they had, plus more.

Monophysites and miaphysites are the same thing. You just listed two groups that were united and constituted the majority of them for 1,000 years. That doesn't sound very fractured to me.

>Without the Muslim conquests, Chinese influence there would grow.
It was the An Lushan rebellion that weakened the Chinese presence in the region you brainlet

Manicheism would have probably taken the place of Islam in Central Asia, and Zoroastrism would have resisted in Iran and surrounding areas and, depending on how the Byzantine-Sasanid wars went, it could have also spread in Egypt and Syria

Certainly not like that.

Syriac for one, and also Aramaic in a larger sense

No, I think just Christianity would predominate. Zoroastrianism was already well in decline and about to be mass replaced by Nestorian Christianity even in Persia by the time the Arabs invaded

North Africa during St. Augustine's time and North Africa on the eve of the Arab Conquests were very different places. Various ports had silted up, the number of churches had dwindled, and Roman control had been pushed back to a handful of cities on the Mediterranean due to the expansion of Berber kingdoms.

The state of Christianity is going to be heavily dependent on whether or not the Roman Empire can maintain control of the Egypt and the Levant. Arianism is dead, Dontism is fading away, but the Monophysites are are still going strong and Heraclius and his successors were invested in the compromise of Monothelitism to try and unify the ERE religiously. Like most religious compromises Monothelitism, was opposed by basically everyone since it was an awful middle ground. While the Niceans living in the ERE couldn’t do much about the issue, the Pope in Rome could and almost certainly would. With the power of the ERE in Italy a waning even before the last Roman-Sassanid War, the Pope is almost certainly going to be looking towards the Franks and the Lombards to remove the last vestiges of the ERE from Italy and save the Papacy from the heretic emperor. The Romans would be in no position to defend Italy from a Frankish invasion. A Monothelite ERE means a Great Schism several centuries early.

If you want to avoid a schism caused by Monothelitism, you need the Empire to lose Egypt and probably the Levant. A world without Islam isn’t going to erase the fact that migration out of Arabia had been increasing for some time, so maybe in the Empire’s weakened state after the last Roman-Sassanid War, an Arab warlord conquers Egypt. Not being Muslim, these Arabs integrate into the Coptic society and adopt the native form of Christianity. Alternatively, the relationship between the Ghassanids and the ERE continues to break down and the Arab Ghassanids invade the Levant and Egypt. Losing Egypt and the Levant to Monophysites would likely have a similar religious impact on the Empire as losing them to the Muslims did.

Nordic Paganism is unlikely to survive any better than it did in our world. That being said, Northern expansion of Christianity, at least into Saxony might be slowed slightly. Without the Arab slavers and pirates ravaging Southern France, and with grain from the Christian Mauri in North Africa being an important part of the European economy, Europe will remain very Mediterranean-centric. Killing Saxons and chopping down their dumb tree is cool and all, but the Visigothic kingdom had been lurching from one civil war and the Franks were no stranger to intervening in Hispania. A Frankish Empire that stretches from the Rhine to the Pillars of Hercules may very well sound more inviting than conquering the Saxons.

Zoroastrianism is fucked up. The main patron of the faith, the Sassanians, is bleeding to death after their last war with Rome. Coup after coup, and endemic civil war have destroyed the central authority of the Shah and turned the Sassanian Empire in a feudal patchwork paying lip service to an emperor that can be dethroned any instant. Nestorianism was already making massive inroads into Iraq and when an enterprising Arab warlord invades and pushes the Iranians out of Mesopotamia you can bet the remnants of Zoroastrianism in Iraq will vanish within a hundred years or so. The crippling of the Shah means that the ability to keep main line Zoroastrianism on top is going to be minimal. Mazdakism, Nestorianism, and Manichaeism will almost certainly emerge in places where nobles either want another excuse to weaken the authority of those above them or where invading Turks settle. I don’t see Zoroastrianism vanishing, but it will be religion that’s mostly only found in the Iranian Plateau.

Central Asia is going to be one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. You’ll see Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Tengri, Mazdakism, Nestorianism, Manichaeism, and probably more.

There were several Arabian languages in South Arabia itself ironically enough, that got replaced by Arabic I believe

>Arabs conquer Greek territories and loot their philosophical works
>if Arabs never came around and Greeks kept their territories would we still have those philosophical works
yes?????

Christianity would be much more widespread throughout the Eurasian landmass, and Zoroastrianism would dominate the Iranian plataeu. However this means that 1400 years of history has been changed forever and we dont know that another major religion would've sprung up in the absence of Islam.

>be Berber
>spend decades beating back Roman invaders
>get completely swept by stronger Arab invaders and have your entire culture almost eradicated, only barely receiving recognition of any kind in your own homeland 1500 years later
Arabs were a mistake

>Central Asia becomes Buddhist
Central Asia was Buddhist, they are the ones that spread Buddhism to China.

Muslim influence wasn't the problem. It was the internal politics of Chinese state thats the problem. Regional generals became too powerful and civil war started as a result. This brought the downfall of Tang.

What the Arabs did was never something as simple as preservation or translation. Both Western Europe and Byzantium had these texts all along.

They just never applied them the way the Muslims did.

Actually they did come the 1300-1400's, it's called the Renaissance and it was far wider reaching than anything a few ultimately irrelevant Arab philosophers created.

That's kind of the point: the way Renaissance scholars started approaching the Classics never would have happened without the absorption of Arab philosophy texts.

>irrevelant Arab philosophers
Many of those Muslims were absolutely intellectually on par with Renaissance-era Euros. You'd be doing yourself a disservice underrating them.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna

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Considering Manicheism was supported by the Uyghur Khaganate I very much doubt that it could be a Central Asian analogue to Islam.
The Tang advance into Central Asia was checked by the An Lushan rebellion, not the Battle of Talas.

Large swathes of Iraq used to be mandean. Abrahamic-hellenist chimeras like the druse religion might be much more common too.

ah yes avicenna the arab

fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_révolte_berbère
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_Revolt
Berbers fought back against the arabs too, often using islamic justification.
And the Maghreb has preserved major parts of its ancient identity and culture.
In fact, arab pride amongst Maghrebis is a recent phenomina. Before the french colonization, they never called themselves Arabs. The French were directly responsible for destroying much of their indigenous culture.
Lets face it, Maghrebis are probably the least arabized Arabs on earth.

Manichaeism was in decline even before the rise of Islam.

>Nestorian Persia
>Buddhist Sinosphere
>Slavjews

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This. What-if's can be goofy because there were a series of circumstances that make Arabia ripe for a new religion that justified their culture. To say that no such religion ever rose would be to say that the circumstances were never approached either.

Would Manichaeism still be around?

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Well you're responding to a native speaker and I know for a fact that there are dialects much more pushed into extinction by Arabic than ancient Syriac. Namely, Palestinian. Actually the majority of speakers refer to the language by a word closely resembling the European word 'Syriac'. So it's not really a dialect but a name for the language, while the dialect known by that name is semi-intelligible to more than a few speakers.

Furthermore, I feel like you might be underestimating the vitality of Aramaic. Many non-speakers do. Just think about it like this. It was natively spoken in the area of 5 current countries in the 19th century. It disappeared in the smallest one, Lebanon, and there are 4 to go. Losing a finger or a toe is a big deal, but it's not fatal. And the decline in the period of Arab dominance was also not more rapid than this.

I think I heard about that once. There are currently four more languages in South Arabia, with a few speakers, I believe.

Like Tsarist Russia.

I really doubt Nestorianism would have taken over that much of Persia and Central Asia