“The population void gave us Muhamed’s goat-eating armies and Islam.”
Islam had the advantage of being both a warrior culture, and a lot of life rules such as washing up 5 times a day for prayer, using one hand for sanitary purposes and the other for eating from the communal pot, not eating certain foods especially likely to convey disease like pork and seafood, etc. Thus Islam’s fighters had a clear survival advantage by avoiding some of the serious disease spreading behaviors. Does anyone have information on their possible rats, fleas, and lice avoidance rules, also rules for dealing with dead bodies (I know quick burial was one)?
Does anyone have information on their possible rats, fleas, and lice avoidance rules, also rules for dealing with dead bodies (I know quick burial was one)?
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Live on a dairy farm sometime. They feed grain. There are always cats. The rats which spread plague through fleas thrive on grain stores. The Holy Roman Empire survived on communal grain stores. Turks survived on beef cattle, and Arabs on goats, not grain stores. Beef cattle and goats are ruminants. They can survive on grasses. The 535 ad Krakatoa eruption caused grain crops to fail. The grain stores of the Holy Roman Empire soured and dried up. The rats got sick, and passed their illnesses on to humans via fleas.
None of this happened to cattle eating Turks or to goat-eating Arabs. Both tribes took over the middle east.
Since long before 535 Jews have lived among Christians. Among other things, Jews eat grain. Like Muslims, Jews bury their dead quickly. Jews didn’t take over any territory from the Holy Roman Empire like Muslims d.id Recently an ebola epidemic spread through western Africa. It spread much more rapidly than would be typical of a bodily fluid-spread disease like ebola. Researchers discovered that the disease was being spread via the local Muslim custom of kneading the waste products out of the bodies of recently-deceased loved ones before burial.
The food laws etc were lifted from Judaism, obviously.