@awl its not really in fashion in the 21st century to reclaim pre-islamic nationalist glory. I think the last guy to try it was this dude. randomTemp13612770697737982228.…
@augustus@nerthos Pakistan is a modern conception. the mughals didn't bring Islam to that region. it was already Islamic because it was under Persian jurisdiction since the classical ages. during the middle ages (900-1400) it was already a ungovernable clusterfuck of tribals used as a buffer zone between the Persians and Indians. the Muslim Indians intergrated the useful parts of it (Indus river) into their sultanate and the mughal invaders just took the reigns from there and kept stuff mostly the same.
@nerthos@augustus also Egypt converted relatively quickly because the church had zero authority since they just got out of a string of enormous heretic revolts. the Egyptian province was so fucked up before the Arabs came that they folded instantly.
@augustus "Islam spread because they put everyone to the sword" is basically the opposite of what happened. the rashiduns didn't even want the peasantry or non Arabs to adopt it because it would reduce the special status of arabs in society as conquerors of heathens. local rulers chose to adopt it to play on the same field as the Arabs and an advantage over their competitors. the peasantry took a good 200 years to convert and it was mainly economics that caused it to happen. every new Muslim just reduced the amount of say the Arabs had in their own religion which is why the Shiite/Sunni schism stings so much for them.
@augustus to be honest the Zoroastrian religion was getting long in the tooth and needed some kind of revamp badly because it was contributing to the degradation of the Sassanids. Islam was just a much more useful religion that allowed the Persians to expand far beyond their cultural sphere by adopting a religion with less cultural baggage and more convenient political organization (one where priests/imams held less worldly power relative to the ruler). Islam supercharged Persian cultural domination by giving them something in common with the nomadic assholes that they spent a millennia fighting against.
@augustus there just weren't enough Arabs (let alone literate ones capable of statecraft) to run such a massive area so they would import Persian advisors across continents to get the finest administrators in the world. the Arabs feared the Persians would overtake them and they were basically right.
@augustus you are looking at this all wrong. it is the persianization of Islam that is a bigger deal than the islamization of persia. every caliphate after rashidun is so thruroughly FARSED that every medieval Islamic state is based on the Zoroastrian empire's governance and culture.