| abstract
| - When Constantine the Great was Emperor, Christians were still a small minority. Within two generations of his death, Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire and Hellenistic paganism had been outlawed. After that there was no stopping its spread and a century later paganism was almost extinct, even in the Germanic kingdoms which had taken over much of the West. However, even by the 7th century Roman Christianity was still not yet fully formed. There were dozens of differing opinions on subjects such as Christology, free will, original sin and icons, and which ones were deemed orthodox and which were heretical really depended on whatever the emperor's personal thoughts were. Into this mix was introduced Islam, whose adherent's view of God was already quite close to that of the Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt, and it's partly for that reason why, in the OTL, the Christians of the region converted so quickly after the Muslim conquests. In the OTL we know:
* The Emperor Heraclius had Monophysite sympathies, so it's possible that he too would have been attracted to Islam had he known more about it.
* The mainstream Chalcedonian Christians of the west would always have been strongly opposed to change, regardless of whether that change came in the form of heresy or a new religion altogether. It's likely though that a strong emperor could subdue them and force acceptance, just as Constantine and his successors did to the pagans three hundred years earlier.
* As by far the most powerful state in the region at the time, the Roman Empire was always going to dominate its allies, just as America does with NATO today. If the Romans were allied with the Arabs, Arab foreign policy would to a large degree be decided in Constantinople, not Mecca.
* The Zoroastrian emperors of Persia would have done their best to keep Islam out of Iran, just as they did for Christianity. In the OTL, the Arab solution to this was to conquer Persia and impose Islam by force. However, if the Romans had any say, they would much prefer to leave a strong and civilized empire on their eastern border, even if it was heathen, than to spend a vast fortune on an invasion and only succeeding in opening the country up to barbarian nomads. They were still recovering from the disaster that was Justinian's reconquest of Italy. For these reasons, I don't think it's at all unfeasible that a Roman Emperor could convert his empire to Islam, or that his doing so could restrain the expansionist urges felt by the Arabs that would in the OTL lead to them conquering half the known world.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)