It is also possible that Central Asia would be still Buddhist or Manichaean, as those were the major pre-Islamic world religions in the region alongside Nestorian Christianity.
> It spread in Asia mostly through peacful means all the way to China
The spread of Islam to China was only made possible through the spread of Islam first to Sogdiana, and that happened through quite violent means as we know from the written record.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that Muslims spread through conventional warefare and Islam spread through proselytization and incentivising conversion? I would imagine Muslim empires could expand without conversion (as they most definitely did in some areas) and Islam spread without a political presence.
Like, I always thought that the Umayyad elites sometimes didn't even want people to convert, lest their privilege become diluted.
But Sughd, Khorasan, and much of Central Asia didn't become almost entirely Muslim overnight - it still took centuries for it to become the dominant religion with Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Mancheanism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Tengriism and folk traditions remaining common.
Even in the 16th century if you read the Baburnama, pagans and non-Muslims were common across Central Asia and even Muslims like Babur were lax in their religiosity (drinking wine, eating pork, etc).
In most cases, religion didn't largely solidify until the 19th-20th century with the rise of the nation state and nationalism.
Religious nationalism in the modern sense (eg. Political Islam, Political Christianity, Hindutva, etc) only really began in the late 19th century when Rationalist (in the actual philosophical sense - not the tech bro bullcrap) and Enlightenment era thought began spreading.
The arrival of Islam in Sogdiana resulted in an immediate decline in written transmission of other major religions, and they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE. Even the Pamirs, always a relative backwater, were Muslim by the middle of the medieval era. Of course Islam in the region, just like the world religions preceding them, was mixed with age-old pagan beliefs or laxly observant, but in terms of politics and society, Islam of some form certainly became the dominant religion early, and that was due to the violent overthrow of the preceding regime by Qutaya b. Muslim al-Bāhilī and the installment of one that chose Islam as an official religion.
Yet neighboring Nuristan (19th), Kohistan (18th), and Kashmir (17th) didn't fully islamize until the 17th-19th century - 7-10 centuries after Islam arrived in those regions.
> they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE
Absolutely not.
Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol invasions.
Depending on where you draw the line for Central Asia, non-Muslim religions remained significantly practiced in Central Asia well beyond that era as well.
At one point, the Tibetan empire even controlled Kabul during that era, and the Turk Shahis remained Buddhist or Hindu (depending on the leader) well beyond that era.
Even the leader of the Ghurid dynasty (Muhammad ibn Suri) was a Buddhist or Hindu Turk despite using a Muslim name.
> Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol invasions.
I was talking about Sogdiana, not other regions of Central Asia, and 1000 CE is a standard cutoff date in scholarship for the end of the other world religions there.
The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics.
That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.
I wonder if economists regard this as a sign of a bad economy. Some years ago lowland Tajikistan (a country where the economy is weak outside of remittances from gastarbeiter in Russia) saw a sudden wave of building petrol stations one after the other to the point of absurdity. A great many of them then went bust.
Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why.
While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago).
* (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)
