Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

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> (The Mongol Empire didn't manage to eliminate the practice of Islam in the areas under its control, despite ritual washing being punishable by summary execution, so it's plausible that Islam is just that persuasive.)

When/where did the Mongol empire ever try to eliminate the practice if Islam? They definitely shed a lot of blood and destruction in the Muslim world, but afaik the point was never to eliminate Islam, but just territorial conquest. The Mongols were famously tolerant of diverse religions within their borders. Many Mongol rulers even converted to Islam.

Of course, history is vast and multifaceted, so you might be talking about a different time/place than I am.

I don't know they ever did try to eliminate Islam, but the particular issue of washing was a conflict between their religious practices. I learned this from https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/hfsnrYC2aGbr1HEehhwrqZ?start=6m3... by Premodernist, which quotes and discusses 長春真人西遊記:

> Now the subtext here, which Li doesn't come right out and say, but is kinda understood for a contemporary: when the Mongols forbade people from washing in the rivers, that means that if they caught you going into the river to wash, they would kill you on the spot; because that was a taboo in the Mongol religious system. Now that was a problem if you were a Muslim who had come under Mongol rule, because Muslims of course do ritual washings before prayers, and in central Asia they would very often just go down to the local stream or river to do the washings. But if a Mongol saw them doing that, they would go over there and strike them down and kill them. And there are accounts – not in this account, but there are accounts in other historical works from the period, particularly from Muslim writers – that talk about, it was not uncommon for Muslims to be killed by Mongols in this way.

You might wanna look into the history of this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Taymiyya

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