The rise of islam was only possible due to the fight to exhaustion by the Byzantines and Sassanids. If not for the timing, Muhamad and his religion would have been but an obscure cult in the sands of Arabia. Just goes to show that timing is everything in history.
Yea they were absolutely exhausted in terms of economics and demographics but it is so much more than that too which the article touches on.
The lands in the middle east changed hands so many times that you had a generation be born and grow into adulthood without having being firmly associated with one empire or the other.
You had the nomadic tribes grow rich from their mercenary work for either empire.
You also had the fact that both Christian and Zoroastrian faiths took huge blows as the true cross was stolen by the Persians and then the Roman army destroyed the most important Zoroastrian fire temple and snuffed out the eternal flame there.
And finally after the Persians were defeated by the Caliphate, you the the Romans, against their well established strategies, gather their forces for a decisive battle, and then make tactical mistakes allowing for defeat.
It was the perfect storm of the right place, at the right time, with rolling nat 20s.
I don't buy the 'huge blows as the true cross was stolen' story. Christianity did fine for 100s of years in the region. Conversion happened very slowly over a long period of time.
Its not even clear how 'Islamic' the early armies were, they might have considerable Christian and Jewish portions. How differentiated early Islam was from certain version if Christianity is up for debated.
I also think just going with the 'right place, right time' narrative misses good coalition billing, good generalship and other things they did very well. Both Rome and Persia had thought a great number of wars in its history, and faced many 'barbarian' invasion, sometimes from forces that on paper were more impressive, that invaded during ongoing peer conflicts and despite that had been successful.
There does seem to be a tipping point where a place tips from a fairly organized society and constant warfare / conflict just becomes the norm and social and economic forces evolve to supply it ... and effectively keep it going even if it is not in society's best interest. Not a lot of peaceful alternatives at that point that aren't highly vulnerable to the cycle of conflict.
The rise of Islam through military conquest perhaps, but as a religion it is difficult to say. It spread in (East) Asia mostly through peaceful means all the way to China and South East Asia, for example.
But the spread of Islam into China (in reality Central Asia - there's a reason Xinjiang has historically been called Turkestan, Uyghur is the closest living language to Chagatai, and why a Kashgari family has managed the Jama Masjid in Delhi for centuries) and South East Asia was itself because of Islam's prominence in Central and South Asia.
The early Islamic preachers in what became Indonesia and Malaysia were South Asian or Iranian in origin, and a major reason why Persianate motifs are prominent in Southeast Asian Islam. Same with much of Central Asia.
That would have not happened if the Byzantine-Sassanid War did not happen, because what became Yemen and Oman would have remained under Sassanid suzerainity and much of the Levant would have remained Byzantine. And thus, Khorasan, Gujarat, Sindh, and Punjab would have not become Muslim.
That said, I agree with you that the spread of Islam was HEAVILY dependent on trade.
Yes Islam went into China through trade and missionaries via the silk road and sea routes.
There is a one thousand year old mosque in Beijing. There are ethnic Hans who converted (now the Hui minority). There was a sizeable Muslim community in Guangdong in the Tang Dynasty.
The same holds true, as far as I know, throughout South East Asia.
My point is simply that Islam could and did spread peacefully, like Christianity did before it. So it is difficult to draw drastic conclusions, IMHO.
> It spread in Asia mostly through peacful means all the way to China
The spread of Islam to China was only made possible through the spread of Islam first to Sogdiana, and that happened through quite violent means as we know from the written record.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that Muslims spread through conventional warefare and Islam spread through proselytization and incentivising conversion? I would imagine Muslim empires could expand without conversion (as they most definitely did in some areas) and Islam spread without a political presence.
Like, I always thought that the Umayyad elites sometimes didn't even want people to convert, lest their privilege become diluted.
But Sughd, Khorasan, and much of Central Asia didn't become almost entirely Muslim overnight - it still took centuries for it to become the dominant religion with Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Mancheanism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Tengriism and folk traditions remaining common.
Even in the 16th century if you read the Baburnama, pagans and non-Muslims were common across Central Asia and even Muslims like Babur were lax in their religiosity (drinking wine, eating pork, etc).
In most cases, religion didn't largely solidify until the 19th-20th century with the rise of the nation state and nationalism.
Religious nationalism in the modern sense (eg. Political Islam, Political Christianity, Hindutva, etc) only really began in the late 19th century when Rationalist (in the actual philosophical sense - not the tech bro bullcrap) and Enlightenment era thought began spreading.
The arrival of Islam in Sogdiana resulted in an immediate decline in written transmission of other major religions, and they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE. Even the Pamirs, always a relative backwater, were Muslim by the middle of the medieval era. Of course Islam in the region, just like the world religions preceding them, was mixed with age-old pagan beliefs or laxly observant, but in terms of politics and society, Islam of some form certainly became the dominant religion early, and that was due to the violent overthrow of the preceding regime by Qutaya b. Muslim al-Bāhilī and the installment of one that chose Islam as an official religion.
Yet neighboring Nuristan (19th), Kohistan (18th), and Kashmir (17th) didn't fully islamize until the 17th-19th century - 7-10 centuries after Islam arrived in those regions.
> they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE
Absolutely not.
Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol invasions.
Depending on where you draw the line for Central Asia, non-Muslim religions remained significantly practiced in Central Asia well beyond that era as well.
At one point, the Tibetan empire even controlled Kabul during that era, and the Turk Shahis remained Buddhist or Hindu (depending on the leader) well beyond that era.
Even the leader of the Ghurid dynasty (Muhammad ibn Suri) was a Buddhist or Hindu Turk despite using a Muslim name.
> Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol invasions.
I was talking about Sogdiana, not other regions of Central Asia, and 1000 CE is a standard cutoff date in scholarship for the end of the other world religions there.
Not sure if this is true, he got "lucky" with technological advantage of warfare (Mongol bows) compared to other nations close to him as horse archers were literally "meta" to fight vs heavy/peasant infantry same case as Crassus fighting Parthians.
You mean you only need better bows to conquer the world? What about millions of warriors already trained in battles and already winning against the biggest and most competent military force in that world (China) after hundreds of years iterated tactics and strategies?
Not really true. Horse archers were a thing before him and after him. And many of the people he thought were either horse archers themselves, or allied with horse archers, or had fought horse archers for centuries.
Yes and no Mongol Bow was a thing that was just a lot better for this era compared to rest of Eurasia especially with combination with mongols tactics and rest of the regions didn't fight horse archers much for centuries but ofc. you can disagree.
I think its up for debate how much their bows were compared to other steppe people. Since we don't know exactly how the bow making changed across the centuries.
Even if we would accept that their bows were better then some other steppe peoples, he still thought many people that for sure had the same bows as he did.
In fact, most of his life, he thought people who had the same technology, including the invasion of the Qara Khitai.
Then the Jin had allies that likely had the same bow technology. However it seems most of those allies just switched sides.
Only the Khwarazmian Empire and Xia likely didn't have significant troops armed the same way.
It could explain it if you consider how it upended stable equilibriums. If the sedentary civilizations had developed defenses against horse-riding nomads with a specific allocation of resources to that effort, and there was a sudden increase in the size of the threat vector emanating from these horse-riding nomads, it could throw their strategic posture out of alignment with their strategic needs.
In terms of numbers, it's entirely possible that larger numbers of defending sedentary soldiers are needed than attacking horse-riding nomad soldiers for the former to mount an effective defense against the latter.
