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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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