#also; for future reference the Fuhratis aren't the only arab-descendant society here

[thetruearchmagos]

Hiiiii I read that excerpt you posted a bit ago and put a little bit of thoughts in the tags but I'm super curious about it actually

I'm curious about the ranks you used, they're used in the Arab military (at least according to a google search) and I'm wondering what inspired you to use them? Are there other inspirations from Arabic stuff in that, or inspo from other places?

Anyway yeah I liked that excerpt a lot and I'm excited to see more stuff from that story in the future :3

Haha!

... yeah

To cut a long explanation short, the societies and cultures of the 12 Worlds are the descendants of transplanted 'Earth' populations carried over into the Worlds through [undisclosed magic means I try not to think too much about]. The Fuhrati Empire, which that excerpt depicts, is one such group, descended from middle eastern societies and thus carrying down a form of the Arabic language and such traditions.

While I was actually hoping to try and get some 'authentically' pre-modern age Arabic / Islamic ranks and titles, I eventually realised that the invention of formal rank structures in organised militaries as I'd recognise them postdates the fall of most of such 'arab' empires to the Ottomans, which meant that the only rank and unit terms I could find were Ottoman / Turkic descended, not 'Arab'. So, after at least an hour of wasted research, I found an Alternate History forum discussion on early Arab ranks, saw that they'd given up on actually finding any, and used a list of modern Moroccan (?) ranks instead since I don't think I'm cut out for coming up with Arabic words just yet

For a documentation of this odyssey, see this thread;