OK, I'm a tad biased. And historical contrafactuals, apart from being fun to think about, are really pretty meaningless. But reading the history of the Parthians, Sogdians, Bactrians, and what's now Pakistan and India in the era of roughly 200-600 AD, and Southeastern Asia including what's now Indonesia a few centuries later it's hard to escape the suspicion that had history further West taken a slightly different turn, and the religion of Islam either not arisen at all or remained confined to the Arabian peninsula (not an entirely implausible chain of events), in all likelihood from Iran to Japan and Mongolia to Indonesia would all be Buddhist today. And somehow I think that would've made for a somewhat better world. Just sayin'.
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Musica lætitiæ comes medicina dolorum.
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