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But when the Arabs built their empire they did it by steamrolling the (Eastern) Romans and the Persians who had a plenty of martial prowess and whose troops were well battle-hardened, precisely because they had spent hundreds of years butting heads against each other.
The Arabs were highly united and driven when doing their conquests, but that's because they had just been united by a fresh new mission-oriented religion, not any inherent "desertness". Before Mohammed, and during the early parts of his career, the Arabs were notably disunited and prone to clannish infighting.
Also, the Fremen are Chechens.
That would fit the the "empires win except for RNG" claim.
The most likely outcome was the Arabs converting to one of the other existing monotheisms. Most likely of the two being Christianity. It was incredibly lucky (or it was providence) that Mohammed existed and he could draw on the Biblical description of Arabs. And even then they benefited from both nearby empires having dragged each other to death's door.
Without this, they continue as they were with groups like the Ghassanids being aligned with the Christian Romans and being mercenaries for them.
The Arabs actually were Christians before the foundation of Islam. The Middle East was, to my recollection, mostly non-Orthodox Christians like Monophysites and Arians, while Iran was still practicing Zoroastrianism and/or pre-Islamic folk traditions.
Islam is a splinter of Christianity founded by the Arabs, Levantines, and Egyptians to unify them under a new religious authority independent from the existing empires. That's why Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet, because pre-Islamic Arabs were already worshipping Jesus and it got spun into the new faith. They were already monotheist and already disinclined to listen to Rome or Constantinople. The jump to founding a 'new religion' (as opposed to a mere Christian heresy) with its holy city in Mecca, a city they actually controlled, was quite natural.
Incidentally, the five Christian Pentarchs were the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Rome is Catholic, Constantinople was Orthodox up until the 1400's but is now Muslim (and called Istanbul), while Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem fell to the rising Arabs. In other words, 4 of the 5 original Christian holy cities are currently under Muslim control. That is not a coincidence. Those cities were Christian before Islam was founded and flipped to Islam during its rise. The area currently under Muslim control consists of a large chunk of the original territory of Christianity because the Muslims are the descendants of people who were (non-Catholic, non-Orthodox) Christian in 400 AD. The Muslims could even credibly claim to be the 'true' successors to Christ, if not for the fact that doing so would be completely meaningless because religion isn't about making sense.
Also this was not even remotely the start of the holy wars. Before Greek Christians were fighting Egyptian Muslims, it was Greek Orthodox fighting Egyptian Monophysites. Very little actually changed, except that the non-Catholic non-Orthodox Christians founded their own 'Islamic' empire as a counterweight to Constantinople and Rome.
Yes, many historians make the argument that the Islamic focus on pagans is polemic. Mohammed's supposed home was surrounded by different Christians and many Arabs were Christians. Yet it makes it seem like it was mainly a struggle with pagans.
I'm not so revisionist that I'm sold that Mohammed's followers were all Christians though. I think one reading is that the Qur'anic author saw the Christianity was already winning and, like Paul, saw a chance to both convert pagans (who already accepted Allah as a high god ) and assimilate the "god-fearers" who were interested but for whom the lack of an Arabic Bible was a problem with the rest of the monotheistic faiths. The Qur'an explicitly backs the old religions (until it doesn't) and outright states that the point of it being sent down was to give Arabs their own book in "clear Arabic", the Bible not being translated at this time.
One reason I don't believe that they were all out and out Christians is the ignorance of a lot of Christian material. The author of the Qur'an is not only very ignorant about Jesus (his polemics against the divinity of Christ are amateur hour) they can't quite tell what's apocryphal or not. There are other mistakes that are stunningly ignorant for either Jews or Christians.
It would also explain the absolute arrogance of trying to weld together Christianity and Judaism without accounting for all of the reasons Paul had issues with the law or the wide divergence over centuries: they just didn't know what they didn't know.
(Now that I think about it: if it was just the path of least resistance why not abandon the strict monotheism? It would only piss off the Jews but it would bring in far more Christians as allies, it wasn't like most of them at this time were Ebionites)
Huh. In Paradox's games set when paganism was still a thing one of the ways to get your religion reformed and recognized as a stable equal of the organized monotheistic faiths is to capture - iirc - 80% of the existing holy sites. I wonder if someone was influenced by this.
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I didn't say they were driven by their 'desertness'. The 'desert power' analogy is actually about how the Arabs (and the Fremen in Dune for that matter) were actually very sophisticated in military technology, not about poverty causing strength. Just as Britain dominated through its ability to attack anyone anywhere and then retreat behind their oceans to avoid counterattack, the Arabs could do the same in their deserts with their cavalry-centric armies and survival expertise.
The Arab rise to power coincided with the Eastern Roman Empire switching to a much more cavalry-centric army. At that time in military history, the vast infantry armies of antiquity were giving way to the cavalry-centric armies and armored knights of the middle ages. Infantry powers like Rome were supplanted by cavalry powers like the Arabs. Later the Arabs would sweep through Spain and only be stopped by another cavalry-centric army of Franks led by Charles Martel, which led in turn through the course of military evolution to the heavy cavalry-centric armies of France which dominated Europe. They were only supplanted in their supremacy by the Mongols, at which point cavalry peaked and went into decline with the rise of mass levies, pike-and-shot, and artillery warfare.
This is, in fact, what I am referring to when I talk about asabiyyah. A defining factor of the 'Fremen mirage' is that the barbarians are internally united by a common desire to conquer the wealthy civilized nations. This was true of both the Arabs in real life (Muslims have a notoriously us-vs-them mentality) and the Fremen in Dune (with their Green Paradise).
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They also did it in the wake of a plague, when the Romans and Persians were both exhausted by an extensive war and the rest of Europe/Mediterranean was in the midst of the worst political upheaval since the bronze age collapse.
I agree that noone was weak or "lazy" here. I don't think "hardness" played much of a role if any.
A better example would probably be the Mongols conquest of China.
You mean when the Song and the Jin were both exhausted by an extensive war that started when the Song used the Jin to help them in an extensive war against the Liao?
The situations were extremely different.
The Justinian plague(s) had devastated both empires for decades and many areas and urban centers were effectively depopulated. There was no corresponding plague in China.
While there had been war between the Jin and Song, neither were devastated and the Song was in a demographic and economic golden age, while the Jin remained a formidable military power with heavy cavalry and fortified cities, far removed from the collapse seen in Persia, despite facing some internal challenges. Furthermore, even though china was 'divided' the Jin alone had more than twice the population of the Byzantines and Sassanids combined. At the same time the Arabs were far more numerous than the Mongols. The Mongols faced a foe in the Jin alone with 50x their population while the Arabs faced a combined foe of 4-5x their population.
In some ways the military conflict in China had made the sides stronger not weaker because it not being that devastating combined with economic strength of both sides gave them both the motivation and ability to extensively fortify their lands and military innovate, unlike the Byzantines and Sassanids where the conflict mostly served to bankrupt the states and destroy their respective armies.
The two above combined had led to a situation where the Byzantines and the Sassanids were borderline failed states, while china was in a period of strength even if the north and south were divided.
This can also be seen in how the conquests unfolded. The Sassanids military power was broken in a single battle and the Byzantine provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt fell within ~3-6 years. Once the Arabs got through the provinces that were so hostile against the Byzantines that they might have revolted even without the Arabs invading, they effectively didn't get any further into Byzantine lands despite the extremely poor shape of the Byzantines.
Meanwhile, the Jin fought hard for some 20 years and the Song took 70 years grinding war to conquer.
Furthermore, one can also see it in what happened afterwards. Due to how ravaged and depopulated the lands of the Byzantines and Sassanids were, cultural, religious and demographic replacement was possible with entire tribes moving in and settling; unlike in China where the conquerors were a drop in an ocean and had little cultural or religious impact, because they simply couldn't.
This isn't to say that the Arabs weren't militarily competent but the extent of their conquests was almost certainly only possible due to a perfect storm of military, economic and demographic collapse of those they conquered, while the Mongols took on a strong and militarised China with miniscule resources and still won. Trying to draw broader conclusions about the relative strength of nomadic Vs settled, or hard Vs soft societies from the Arab conquest seems more than a little ill-advised imo. The lessons there are different.
Or to give a tl;dr, normal rules about e.g. historical cycles don't apply to Genghis Khan because he is just that badass. As far as I can see, the only other leaders who came close to unifying that many steppe nomads for that long were Atilla the Hun and Osman the founder of the Ottoman Empire.
IMO, the Mongols were no more badass than the British in 1800. They conquered a massive empire despite lacking numbers because they had superior technology. The fact that their superior technology consisted of high-quality bows and a new system of organizing a cavalry army (rather than rifles and clerks) doesn't change that fact.
I think people underestimate the degree to which the Mongol horse archers would have been every bit as impossible in 1,000 BC as British redcoats. The technology hadn't been invented yet. The composite bow, the new breeds of horses, the Parthian shot, the incredible logistics and social organization that allowed the Mongols to supply their armies in the field - all of these things had to be invented before the Mongols could rise to power.
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