LogFAQs > #968349681

ForTheGlory posted...

This is an interesting take.

Especially since he was preaching about peace and charity, there was no reason to believe that he was intending to harm anyone.

I thought the whole deal was that he was exiled from Mecca for "preaching falsehood" and and he and his followers went to Medina and eventually returned with an army and took Mecca. Mohammad himself died before the Caliphate even spanned all of Arabia, IIRC. It was successors who invaded the Eastern Roman and Sassanid Empires (which had conveniently recently spent a few decades fighting a fruitless war with each other, meaning they were both severely weakened).

Interestingly, the Ka'aba already existed in pre-Islamic times: Mohammad simply repurposed it.

The origins of Islam are fascinating, because both Judaism and Christianity were well-represented in the Arabian peninsula and there was an Arabic kingdom called Himyar which made Judaism its state religion and began persecuting Christians, so Ethiopia invaded them, defeated them, and installed a Christian as king. Lots of shit was going on down there. In a sense, Islam is an Arabified synthesis of the two other Abrahamic faiths which incorporates traditional Arabic folklore with the mythoses of Judaism and Christianity.