So, one of the subplots in my urban fantasy story involves a man living in the Middle East who, after being granted a specific form of future sight by the events of the story, resolves to take over the entire Middle East and rule it as a sort of holy emperor. Quick summary. There are two types of superpowers in this story: 1: The kind that everyone gets. As of the beginning of the story, everyone above the age of 13 has these brands on their arms with 4 circles on them, and every week at the same time a new magic rune is added to everyone's brand. Once the brand fills up then each new rune replaces whatever rune was left in the fourth slot (the runes can be moved around so you can pick and choose which ones you keep). 2: Special, unremovable powers that only 24 people, evenly spread across the entire planet (roughly one in each time zone), received. Whenever someone with one of these powers dies, a new random person gets their own, different power, so here are always 24 at any given time. These powers are generally significantly stronger than the first type of power and with fewer limitations on their use. This character is one of the 24, and his power is that he knows, in advance, what the next 8 weeks' powers will be, and exactly what they do. While the other 23 are inclined and/or forced for various reasons to stay quiet about their powers, this one soon goes public claiming to be a messenger of Allah blessed with the gift of prophecy, here to help Allah's faithful finish Mohammad's work of bringing the world under Muslim rule. Now obviously this isn't all it takes. While the nature of a lot of the powers (namely a few that make it nearly impossible to die of natural causes) have staggering religious implications for any religion with a concept of heaven and thus leave much of the religious population desperate for hope and answers, and that combined with his special powers (that as far as the public knows nobody else on Earth has) make his claims incredibly compelling, I'm not about to claim that a couple of fancy parlor tricks and appeals to the dominant religion are going to be all it takes to make the entire Middle East bow to him. ...No, he's got a lot more work to do, and that's what I wanted to ask for advice about. I know next to nothing about how the politics and military of the Middle Eastern world work, and the concept of researching this subject is daunting to say the least, so I was wondering if anyone had any advice or could point to any glaring issues he'd need to deal with that should be the initial subjects of my research. This isn't a major part of the book (the setting of the book is in America), more of a side story used to tease characters for potential future installments and also explain how another villain acquires certain information, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about his rise to power, but I just want to make sure I don't get anything staggeringly wrong. Maybe to start it would be a good idea to put down my initial thoughts on how he goes about exploiting his power for political gain, so I’ve detailed that below: After convincing a particularly pious and extremely wealthy man that he's the real deal and thus gets his hands on some real money and manpower, one of the first major steps he takes is to kill and replace the leaders of as many Middle Eastern countries as he can with his faithful followers, because he figured out how a certain tricky-to-use shapeshifting power works months before the general public did (the power requires killing whoever you want to be able to transform into in a specific and brutal way, and obviously anyone who randomly figured that out would both not be eager to share that fact and also now has an excellent means of covering their own tracks). Thus tons of world leaders are now in the palm of his hand without anyone knowing until it's too late. Despite this, he only makes one of them openly ally with him, just to avoid suspicion and keep himself from over-extending himself in too short a time. Later, at the end of the book, the last thing we see him do for now is to take advantage of his foreknowledge of a set of powers that are going to render nearly all modern technology useless and stage a massive attack on Israel (generally agreed to be the biggest military threat in the Middle East by far, and the one he has by far the lowest chance of persuading to join him) while all of its technology and weapons are worth nothing against an army armed with the suddenly-very-effective medieval arms and armor. Another side note: this last part is what I'm the iffiest about even before starting my research, because it seems like a stretch that anyone would be able to sufficiently equip an army with medieval weaponry without word getting out and every country on Earth becoming suspicious of what Prophet Guy is planning. It just rings so many "This is unbelievable" alarm bells in my head, but I know there's some way he can take advantage of this perfect window of opportunity for a brutal strategic victory that I can come up with if I just think about it a little more. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, and if anyone could point me in the right direction about where to start, I’d be incredibly grateful.
This is what you have to remedy. The glaring issue here is, as far as I see it, that you consider the "Middle East" as one homogenous region that one can simply "take over" with religious zealotry (apart from Israel, of course, the always convenient sacrificial scapegoat). Why, just because they're predominantly muslim? Europe is predominantly christian, and still everybody knows and acknowledges the differences between Sweden and Greece. If you want to make your char really go on a jihad to finish Mohammed's job, you will have to learn about Shia and Sunnah, the reasons for the eternal rivalry betwen Iran and Saudi Arabia and their respective spheres of influence, their historical relationship to the USSR and the USA, the special role of Turkey and Jordan and and and... Unless you write something like 1001 nights, this really won't cut it.
This is why I was reluctant to even ask this question. I was afraid there was no way I could describe it that didn’t sound offensive in at least some capacity. My apologies. I suppose the intended-to-be-interest-piquing title can’t have helped that impression. I think I phrased a few things poorly, so just to clarify: 1: This isn’t something that happens all at once. By the end of the book he only openly takes over one or two countries with his shapeshifting coup, probably just one, the one he decides will be the easiest to get a foothold in, while more subtly manipulating others until he’s ready to have his shapeshifted minions act. Again, I don’t intend to imply the entire Middle Eastern world can be so easily united even by their faith. It’s more that the supernatural elements of the story make this easier due to the specifics of what’s going on directly impacting their faith in a devastating way and leaving people desperate for answers. 2: I realize now that the first post sounds very cavalier and looks like I only intended to do the most cursory research about this and expected what could be contained in a thread to be enough. I apologize, what I meant was more that I wanted to get a better idea of where I’d start looking for what I’d need to know, since it’s a huge topic and I want to be efficient about it since it’s only the subject of a handful of side chapters and not the central focus of the book.
You want to take over part of Asia? Have you considered a land war? I find that long-term occupation by a large conventional military force seems to work best.
You should take some inspiration from the attempts of the west to take over the middle east during the crusades. Interesting battles there. Nur Al-Din and Saladin were great military leaders. The Knights Templar were a great force, like the SAS of their time.
Oh shit, good point, especially given the whole “modern technology becomes useless in war” thing that happens by the time he’s prepared to start waging actual war. Those tactics would become highly relevant again, though obviously modified to account for the various magic powers, and it would be really interesting if this guy was well-read on the subject.
