Worldbuilding: Muslim Europe, Christian Middle East, British Short Story Collection

It's not as insane as it sounds, I promise. Also a short story collection from a familiar name and CONJuration reminder

Back when I was a regular participant in the Internet’s largest alternate history forum, I came up with two versions of a scenario (here’s the first and here’s the second) where Europe becomes Muslim and the Middle East becomes Christian. Although on the surface it sounds ridiculous, if you diverge from real history in the later pre-Islamic period or earlier Islamic period it’s doable. Especially since for centuries after the Islamic conquests outside Arabia, Egypt and Syria-Palestine remained majority Christian.

The point of divergence for my timeline is that the Roman Exarch of North Africa Heraclius the Elder never leaves North Africa to overthrow Emperor Phocas. Consequently, Constantinople falls to the combined efforts of the Sassanid Persians and the nomadic Avars in 626 AD rather than holding out as it did in real life. The Eastern Emperor and his court escape to Sicily. With the crippling of the hated Roman government, Egypt successfully breaks away under native-Christian rule, while Heraclius presides over a breakaway Roman state in North Africa that over generations “goes native.”

Not long afterward, the overextended Persian Empire falls into civil war just as the Muslim Arabs begin advancing out of Arabia. The Egyptians, now masters of their own destiny rather than oppressed masses yearning to breathe free, fight off the Arabs rather than welcome them as liberators. With Egypt blocking the Arab advance into North Africa, the Arabs instead push through Anatolia into Greece and the still-pagan Slav lands. The eastern Persian claimant(s) manage to hold the line at the Zagros Mountains, preventing (for the moment) Islamic advance into Persia proper, Central Asia, and India. The Islamic world becomes an arc including the entirety of Arabia and reaching through Mesopotamia-Syria-Palestine, Anatolia, Greece, and the Balkans all the way to the fringes of Italy and Germany and the Baltic Sea and including much of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (i.e. Ukraine and southern Russia).

Over the years, various tribes that migrated westward into Europe and converted to Christianity instead convert to Islam. Look at this map here showing Magyar (early Hungarian) raids throughout Europe. With Islam providing stronger government organization and literacy much earlier, I’m imagining a bigger realm that threatens Germany (much of which would have only been newly Christianized, if that), the western Balkans, and Italy itself. Most of the Norse (with possibly the exception of Denmark) would convert to Islam as well due to trade links with the Black Sea and now-Muslim Constantinople. Furthermore, at least some of the mass Arab migrations that would have gone to North Africa might instead go to Europe, possibly the Pontic steppes or the mountainous regions where pastoralism has always been practiced.

Between direct Arab conquest and settlement of southern Europe, the Islamization of the post-Roman “barbarian invaders” from the east and north, and the eventual conversion of the people those invaders conquer, the Franks and their successors and other Christian states in Europe are ground down over a prolonged period, much like the Byzantine Empire and the Nubian kingdoms in Africa in real life. Spain and Portugal (possibly ruled by or assisted by Christianized Berbers from northern Africa in an analogue to the Almoravids and Almohads), the British Isles (perhaps after a Reconquista-analogue where Muslim Norse are ejected from what would be our world’s Danelaw), Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearics, and perhaps Iceland are the remaining strongholds of Christianity in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Nestorian “Church of the East” spreads heavily in Persia, Central Asia, India, and the borderlands of China. This uploaded book describes just how successful they were in real life and the potential to do even better is vast, especially if they can avoid the xenophobic repression of the Chinese Ming Dynasty or the genocide of Tamerlane. The real-life tribes that converted to Islam in Persia (like the Seljuks) will convert to either Zoroastrianism or, since that faith is not particularly noted for evangelism, to Nestorian Christianity. At least two of the Mongol tribes in real life converted to Christianity, which in this scenario will have less competition due to the reduced presence of Islam. With a great many of the neighboring Turkic tribes Christian and more Christians among the Mongols themselves, the odds of Christian Mongol khanates rapidly go up.

(I imagine Islam would still spread via the Silk Road and Indian Ocean networks, so it won’t be totally unfamiliar. The only area where it would be absent would be the trans-Saharan trading network. This world’s Sudanic Kingdoms are likely to be Donato-Catholic — more on the first part later — or Monophysite rather than Muslim, while the Christian kingdoms of Nubia will never fall and likely spread their faith into mainland eastern Africa.)

In this alternate timeline, the historically-dominant Christian groups — Eastern Orthodoxy and the Latin Church that would spawn both Catholicism and Protestantism — have been marginalized outside of North Africa and the Western Mediterranean and, depending on just how different Irish Christianity was from Roman, the British Isles and Iceland. The dominant types of Christianity in Africa and the Middle East are the Oriental Orthodox, with Donatism providing a Kharijite edge to Christianity in North Africa. The regions of Asia that become Christian will be Nestorian, although there will still be Buddhists, Manicheans, and others.

Although I hadn’t put much thought into how Islam would develop, I imagine Greek replacing Persian as the “high culture” influencing the faith in its earliest stages. If I wished to parallel the real-life Abbasid Revolution, I could keep the Umayyads (or some similar group) as Arab supremacists uninterested in converting non-Arabs and some analogue to the Abbasids consisting of European converts (per my earlier comment, probably Greeks) replacing them and more zealously spreading the faith outside the Arab elite. Owing to environmental and cultural concerns, European Muslims might be more flexible on pork and alcohol than Arab Muslims and could have holdover beliefs from Christianity, like a celibate religious class or using bells in the call to prayer. That might be a cause for some analogue to the Sunni-Shia split. Islam could still spread to Eastern Africa, India, and Southeast Asia via the Indian Ocean network, although its initial seeding would be smaller than real history, since Persian sailors would remain non-Muslim.

One aspect of this world that will drastically differ from our own is agriculture — the conquering Arabs established a single political-cultural-economic zone from southern France to the borders of China and from Central Asia to central India and diffused different crops and agricultural techniques throughout. With the Islamic realm much smaller, there’ll be a lot less of this going on. The cultivation of sugar, for example, will take a lot longer to spread from India to the Mediterranean. Persian irrigation techniques will spread more slowly, if they spread at all.

As far as fiction set in this world is concerned, I did have an idea for a story entitled “The Sea Falcon of Alexandria” following an Egyptian Christian corsair fighting Muslim rivals based in Anatolia and Greece, but I haven’t put much thought into developing a plot or characters. It might make an interesting role-playing game setting though — Christian and Muslim missionaries to different European, African, and African societies, Muslim Vikings vs. Celtic-rite Scots, Irish, and English, sea battles in the Mediterranean with the traditional North-Christian and South-Muslim orientation reversed, religious competition between coastal Muslims and interior Monophysite Christians in eastern Africa, etc. It’s my understanding the GURPS role-playing system can be applied to any setting, so this wouldn’t even be that difficult.

The coming of the Nestorian horse-tribes — who won’t have the persecutory imperial-church baggage that made relations difficult between the Catholic Crusaders and their Orthodox Byzantine allies and the native Christians — into the Middle East would be one of those game-changing events like the fall of Cadia and the opening of the Great Rift or the revival of Roboute Guilliman in the war-game Warhammer 40,000. Christian Turks and Mongols occupying Arabia lead to the Muslim governments of Europe calling for a great jihad to protect/liberate Mecca and Medina.

(Yes, the irony is deliberate. And if European Muslims and Arab Muslims follow different versions of Islam the Crusades parallels are even stronger — one reason the Catholic Church supported the Crusades was hopes bailing out the Byzantines could end the Great Schism on Catholic terms. Euro-Muslims, or at least some of them, might have the same ideas.)

That said, the alternate Mongol-Turkic invasion of the Middle East could be the subject of a book or series thereof, with all the history I’ve described as the back-story.

So many ideas, so little time…

A Short Story Collection You Might Enjoy

Back in August, British author Thomas Norford was so kind as to help me promote a $0.99 discount deal for Battle for the Wastelands, and I shared with you his novel The Starved God. More recently, he helped promote the Kickstarter for The Walking Worm.

So here’s a short story collection he wrote: Anomic Bombs: Five Sci-Fi Tales of Organisms Not Quite Fitting In.

Five stories, one of which is longer than the others, and for $1.75 (U.S.) as well. Looks like a good bargain.

Final CONJuration Reminder

I’ll be attending CONJuration in AtlantaNovember 15-17. Below is the list of panels I will be on, along with other participants:

The Hobbit Movies: Not As Bad As You Think-Although many people derided the Peter Jackson Hobbit films, I actually enjoyed them. Benedict Cumberbatch is great as the dragon Smaug, and actually seeing the Battle of the Five Armies onscreen was fun. It was like the fantasy equivalent of the movie Gettysburg. Yes, Jackson went beyond the lore in places, but I had no problem with those. Saturday, 8 PM.

Adding Personality To Your Worlds-I’m on this panel with fellow author Lynette Bacon-Nguyen, whom I met at CONJuration in 2023 and with whom I’ve split tables at Days of the Dead and at one of Charlie’s Collectible Shows. This panel will discuss how to create engaging side characters in one’s stories. Friday, 8 PM.

Artist and Author: Collaborating On Book Cover Art-I’m on this one with fellow members of the Horror Writers Association Atlanta Chapter Marlena Frank, Kelley Frank, and Jessi Ann York. I’ve gotten a lot of compliments for the book covers done by artist Matt Cowdery, whom I met at DragonCon back in 2018. Here’s my chance to share what I’ve learned with everybody. Saturday, 6 PM.

Snape and Lupin In Canon: Character Deep Dives-This is a panel I’m qualified for due to my experience with fan-fiction centered on this two characters and how that required me to get into their personalities. Back in my twenties I wrote (or in one case co-wrote) two alternate-universe Harry Potter fanfics featuring them as protagonists. In “The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince,” Snape breaks with the wannabe Death Eaters as a teenager when Mulciber attacks Lily rather than her friend Mary Macdonald, setting up a completely different trajectory for his life and a very different First Wizarding War. In “Lord of the Werewolves,” various tragic circumstances (no details for spoiler reasons) force Lupin to swear allegiance to the werewolf terrorist Fenrir Greyback. It quickly turns into Valkyrie — the movie about the military plot to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime — only with werewolves. And it features an absolutely gloriously terrible (or terribly glorious) Duran Duran sex pun. Saturday, 1 PM.