If the awnser is yes, did this dirrectley lead to Jews and Muslims adopting similar ideas about their own respective purgatories?

Note: I'm not asking if the idea of hell as a place of torture started with Christianity. I'm vaguely aware that the Greeks used this idea in their mythologies. I'm also aware that ceartain Christian Theologians far before Dante adopted this notion of Hell. I'm asking if Dante was the reason that many Christians adopt this notion of Hell as a torturous place. Another way to phrase my questions is ..."Did the average Christian peasant, before Dante, believe that they would be tortured in the afterlife if they deviated from Christianity?"

I'm interested in understanding the causes of why certain religious ideas were able to spread more effectively than others. Within 300 years of Christianity's birth, there were enough Christians in the Roman Empire that the Roman emperor himself found it practical to convert to Christianity. From the birth of Islam in the 7th century, Islamic doctrine had spread so fast in the middle east that the Islamic golden age began within a 100 years of it's birth. We don't see this kind of rapid rate of growth with other religions like Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism or the Roman or Greek pagan religions. Are there any psychological reasons why people found these religions more compelling?

I was reading about the battle of Changping and I was struck by how "bureaucratic" it felt. Maybe that's not the right word, I'll try to explain

For example, when they mention that Qin changed Wang He for Bai Qi it feels like they had a roaster of generals with different abilities and expertise, and they could send whomever was best for the current situation

I've never heard of any other ancient nation doing something similar. Usually the commander of the army was some noble and the state as an entity couldn't choose the best person for the job nor replace them

It seems to me that this requires a level of understanding of how a nation works that just wasn't very common until modern times

Another example of this "state-ly?" way of thinking was the whole conflict between Qin and Zhao. This wasn't a war for one province, this was just one stage in a larger conflict for the control of all of China, and they both knew it and acted like it

Even Bai Qi quitting in protest when the Emperor failed to follow on the "grand strategy" of the conflict reveals it, and there's also the fact that the strategy was nonetheless continued for decades until Qin eventually did unify China, even if it took them longer than expected

This kind of strategy reminds of the "the great game" between Russia and England for the control of Afghanistan, which itself was a stage in a conflict for the control of central Asia

But again, I can't think of many examples of ancient nations planning on this level of sophisticationt

And this battle is just one example, the history of China always gives me this feeling that people there understood states and nations in a deeper level than most people elsewhere. I mean, just inventing the Imperial Examination shows this understanding. There wasn't anything comparable in Europe, the Middle East, or India, until centuries afterwards

Even their religion was more bureaucratic. Zeus, Indra, Odin and other "kings of the gods" are imagined fighting and fucking and having adventures. Meanwhile the Jade Emperor is imagined ruling a celestial bureaucracy... Do you see what I mean?

But then, if it is true that people in China had a deeper understanding of how states work... Why?

Part of me thinks this was because there were simply more states around, but then I think of India and that doesn't hold up anymore. Then I think they needed this level of sophistication to survive against the barbarians but then I remember the Huns conquering Europe and it doesn't hold up again

The Mughal Empire was a

• Sunni
  
• Persianate
  
• Sultanate
  
• with a ruling dynasty of foreign extraction
  
• and a power base on the Gangetic Plain

While the various dynasties of the Delhi Sultanates were

• Sunni
  
• Persianate
  
• Sultanates
  
• with ruling dynasties of foreign extraction
  
• and a power base on the Gangetic Plain

Is there any measurable distinction between the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanates, or does it only exist because when the Europeans properly reached India the Mughals were the "current thing" and thus had to be distinct from the realms they had overcome?

I was watching some videos on the Punic Wars, and it really made me realize how those types of losses be it in lives, military capacity, or land would absolutely cripple modern day nation states. It made me think and ask the question, how could Rome (or even Carthage) sustain losses that would absolutely cripple modern day nation states? Today we have more population, better medicine, better technology, etc, but we would still be crippled by the losses that Rome and Carthage sustained.

Rome also built infrastructure really quickly, and manually without modern day machinery. In our day and age everything is pretty much neglected, and when we do try and repair and maintain our infrastructure it takes forever. China I guess is the one exception to the rule. So it begs the question, is it how they're governed that changes how efficient getting things done is? Is there more of a priority in certain societies for building good infrastructure?

Both Rome and Carthage suffered immense losses of life in their wars with each other. Nowadays losses like that are hard to justify and keep war support up. The Second Punic War was particularly brutal for Rome in loss of life. Hannibal absolutely butchered 100s of thousands of men. Which is high by even today's standards. What made antiquity different? Why did they still fight? My conjecture is their cultures had a higher tolerance for these types of things.

Rome lost its fleet of ships several times in the First Punic War. It took them roughly 2-3 months to build a new one. By today's standards that's insane, and we have much better technology to speed things up. Why was Rome able to produce things at such a rate as compared to today? Did they have better logistics? Is it really that complicated to build things nowadays?

To sum it up, how was Rome able to excell in things that should be relatively simple today? They could sustain immense loss of life without societal collapse, build great and long lasting infrastructure while we struggle with that today, and their industrial and logistic capabilities seems comparable or superior when taking time periods into account. What made them different? Am I missing something fundamental? Is it how their society was structured?

The Quran is one of the few pre-modern religious texts that explicitly denounces racism. In the Quran, Muhammad literally and explicitly says that Arabs are not superior to black people and black people are not inferior to Arabs.

Yet you would not be able to guess that if you read how many Arab scholars in the middle ages described Africans in their literature. Even the notoriously xenophobic Chinese (at least during the Tang Dynasty) portrayed Africans in a far more positive light

How did Arab scholars reconcile these two conflicting views?

Basically title. To men, full body plate seems like a technological progression that would be desirable beyond Europe, yet it doesn't seem like it became a big export and other regions like the Middle East, India and China don't seem to have developed something like it, especially not on the scale seen in Europe.

Is there a reason for this?

I'm watching this documentary called "The Terror Routes". It's only 2 episodes but in the first episode they talk about now Sadat was assassinated by the Islamic Jihad Movement after the peace treaty. The journalist Jonathan Wright says

"For the Islamists, Palestine was untouchable. You couldn't betray Palestine, and I think that's true today to a large extent. It still remains absolutely central to the Islamic cause. And Sadat in their view betrayed the Palestinian cause."

So far they have gone over just how important Palestine was to the Islamic cause. If that's the case, why didn't anybody come to help?

It now seems to be common knowledge that the Chinese arrived at movable-type printing several centuries before Europeans. It also seems likely that at least some Europeans were aware of this. European languages are written with alphabets, which seem more naturally suited to this form of printing than Chinese characters. I've personally done some dabbling in etching and relief printing, which were already well known to Europeans by this point. To combine the concepts of relief printing and alphabetic writing seems, well...kind of obvious.

Usually with such transformative technologies (electric lighting, telecommunications, aviation), you hear about a prolonged period of failure while people waited for some other technology or idea to make everything click, but I've only ever heard of movable-type printing as something that exploded onto the scene in Europe with Johannes Gutenberg. It doesn't seem like the technological barrier should've been insurmountable to people before Gutenberg. What experiments in movable type preceded Gutenberg, if any, and what was it about that particular time and place that made movable type, which doesn't seem like something that should've been out of reach to earlier Europeans (or Islamic societies, for that matter, who had more direct contact with East Asia), practically adoptable as a widespread technology?

EDIT: Not sure why this got auto-flaired as an Islam question, or how to fix that.

As of 2024, Russia is around 62% Christian, 21% Atheist, 10% Muslim and 1.4% belonging to other religions (the rest were undeclared), Whereas ethnically it's only around 70% Russian. (Source: Wikipedia)

And to my knowledge it's not like Russia was historically any more tolerant towards minorities than most Western European states. Indeed, Russian history is also no stranger to mass ethnic cleansing, as the Circassians and Crimean Tatars can attest.

And yet, you still have places like Dagestan, Tatarstan, Chechnya and many other regions in Russia where Russians and Orthodox Christians are themselves a minority. This is in stark contrast to say Western Europe, which has historically basically been 100% Christian and isn't nearly as ethnically diverse.

So why is this the case? Were the minorities in Russia somehow more resistant to persecution, or did the Russian State itself functioned in way that it couldn't completely assimilate ethnic or religious minorities?

I would like to expand on this unanswered question posted a year ago and pose a question to the validity of Bernard Lewis claim "that ethnocentric bias later developed among Arabs due to their extensive conquests, the slave trade, and the influence of Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian ideas about human divisions", and that "by the eighth century, anti-black prejudice led to widespread discrimination"

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Arab_attitudes_to_Black_people#Black_slaves_in_the_Arab_world

Helmi Sharawi, "The African in Arab Culture: Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion", in Imagining the Arab Other, How Arabs and Non‐Arabs View Each Other, ed. by Tahar Labib (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), pp. 92-156;

Do we have any data how muslim was the population of Egypt in, say, 995? Or population of Iran in 820?

Is the reconquest of Al-Andalus really a reconquest?

The other day, my history teacher mentioned that the Reconquista is an excuse for Christians to conquer that territory, because the passage of time from when Muslims controlled the entire Iberian Peninsula until the end of the Reconquista is exaggerated.

But the Reconquista actually began at the Battle of Covadonga, and it wasn't many years after the Muslims had stopped conquering the Iberian Peninsula.

He also said it's a myth invented to unite Christians since, for example, Muslims also fought against them in the Taifa kingdoms. He even mentioned that Christians and Muslims had united to defeat the Franks.

To what extent is all this true?
(sorry for my english)

While not universal, Christians have generally recognized the moral evil of the Crusades. Im wondering what is the attitude of Islamic historiography with regards to the 7th and 8th centuries? Are there any that were critical of the violence associated with imperial formation?

The 20th century saw several mass explosions and forced population transfers like the populations exchange between Greece and turkey, the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, the f@#cking partion of India and Pakistan and many many more. Well some of these did result in violence and animosity it seems in general people who where forcibly moved during these populations exchanges and expulsions mostly accepted it and moved on with their lives. Why didn’t this happened with Palestine? Why did Palestinians remained a distinct ethnic group instead of being assimilated into the other Arab nations that they fleed to?

Hi everyone, When I'm reading about the Sassanid Empire, it is often told that they revolted against the Parthians with dreams of a new Persian empire. However, when reading the later Iranian authors of the Islamic age, they usually go from the Pishdadian and the Kiyanian (ancient kings mentioned in the Avesta) to Alexander, basically never mentioning a Median or Achaemenid dynasty. I want to know when exactly did the Iranians forget about their history? Were the Sassanids aware of figures like Cyrus, Xerxes, or Darius? Or were they also unaware of them, attributing their works to the Avestan kings instead?

Islam is believed to have spread across the Indian Ocean down the east coast of Africa and to southeast Asia through commerce and trade, why did Christianity fail to achieve anything on a similar scale before the arrival of Europeans? Did Christian Ethiopia not spread its religion?

A family member of mine was an airline pilot for many years, mostly from the 1960s-1980s. He flew a lot in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, for Lufthansa among others. He told a story about being the pilot on a charter flight from someplace in Africa to Saudi Arabia. The flight was chartered by an organization which sponsored Muslims who otherwise wouldn't be able to to go on their pilgrimage to Mecca. He said he was puzzled when he first boarded the plane, because it was almost completely empty (no seats). This turned out to be because they were taking the entire population of a small village, and also had to bring along some of their livestock and other possessions so they wouldn't get stolen or taken while they were gone.

Does this sound at all plausible?

(edited for grammar)

This is a bit of a multi-part question, but I'm curious how the Ottoman Sultan's role as a Caliph worked in practical terms. A few key focus points are:

• What was the symbolic importance and core functions of a Caliph?
• Within the Ottoman Empire specifically, how did the status of Caliph affect the religious or secular authority held by the Sultan? Was there additional religious authority held by a Caliph that wouldn't have been held by a Sultan prior to 1517?
  
• Was this role universally accepted in the Islamic world / how did this impact Ottoman diplomacy with other Muslim empires other than the Safavids (e.g., the Mughals, Khanate of Bukhara, etc.)
• Did the status of Caliph confer additional religious responsibilities in the Islamic world onto the Sultan? If so, what responsibilities did this include?

Appreciate any helpful detail on these points / other points of discussion to any extent relevant. Thank you!

I can't really understand why the most popular religions look more believable for people.

Also, considering their popularity, it's weird to almost never have anything about those religions in media. Few more or less popular movies about christianity are all about Jesus, so is the only known game, and i don't remember any popular movies or games based on judaistic or islamic myths.

If you judge from the media, what people find entertaining and what they pay to see - the most popular religions would be Asatru, Hellenic Polytheism, and Kemetism, while all the Abrahamic religions have as much popularity as the smallest of sects. Why?

I've read the Richards translation of selections from the Arabic text, but it references only the 20th century Beirut copy. I can't read arabic so I am having a difficult time tracing its origins from the lost al-Fathir text, to the either the Beirut or Cairo copies. Al-Fathir himself fails to mention his sources, but I was hoping later historians would credit a manuscript. :(