Muslims Have Not Won a War of Conquest In Centuries: WHY?

In this raw, unfiltered episode of Based Camp, Malcolm & Simone Collins tackle a politically explosive question: Why have Muslim-majority forces historically struggled to conquer and durably hold new territory from non-Muslim groups in modern times?

Malcolm walks through centuries of examples—from the rapid early Islamic expansions to Ottoman Janissaries (often Christian-origin elites), the Yom Kippur War debacle, Cyprus 1974, East Timor, Azerbaijan-Armenia clashes, and more—arguing that success often depended on non-Muslim leadership, extreme minority rule, or unified caliphates that quickly fractured.

They explore deeper patterns:

* Coups & hierarchy: Why Muslim militaries tend toward rigid command (fear of coups) vs. decentralized Protestant/Jewish models

* Idolatry & status-signaling: Protestant anti-idolatry aversion to luxury vs. opulent signaling in some Muslim/Persian/Catholic cultures

* Delegation success: Early Islamic Golden Age thrived on minority rule + competent outsiders (Jews, Christians); later majority rule often shifted to abuse

* Birth rates, delegation, and modern “solutions” (hire outsiders? Ban excess luxury?)

Heavy on pattern-noticing, historical exceptions, biological/cultural analogies (invasive species, extremophiles), and zero sacred cows. Expect spicy takes on religion, coups, multiculturalism, and why Protestants/Jews rarely stage military coups.

Perfect for fans of contrarian history, cross-cultural analysis, pronatalism, and unapologetic anthropology.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today with a day when I had one of those very thoughts where a thought enters my mind and I begin pulling on it and I’m like. Oh no, this can only end in bad places. Oh no.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, not again,

Malcolm Collins: laughing. When we were doing a recording and I said in the recording something like, well, you know, Muslim majority armies almost never are able to conquer new territory.

And then it sort of got in my head I was like, but wait, isn’t that how Islam primarily expanded in the early days? And then Yeah. They thought they were like a

Simone Collins (2): successful warlike group or something. That’s kinda the impression an outsider gets that doesn’t know anything.

Malcolm Collins: And then I got in, well, yeah, I, I also can talk about them as like an invasive species almost in the same way that the Vikings were, they, they were an extremophile group that developed really extreme individual practices.

And when they were put on the scene around groups that didn’t have defenses against them, they were quickly conquered. Mm-hmm. And you, you often see this with extreme offa groups like the, the [00:01:00] Arab Nomads or the Vikings. Okay. You just need a force to unify them. Yeah. But I then had this second thought, which is okay.

So Malcolm, can you think of any time recently that a Muslim force? No. No. They’re, they’re pretty good as is any sort of highly dispersed group at protecting their territory. Okay. So, so once they have

Simone Collins (2): it, they keep it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We saw this in places like Afghanistan, for example. Okay. But conquering new land, I got in my head I was like, okay, surely I can think of instances in which a Muslim majority group conquered and durably kept the land of a non-Muslim majority group for let’s say over a generation.

Right?

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Give, given the reputation that we think they have. That would make sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so then I just started going through in my head, like the Ottomans, no. Like they were terrible in World War I like, like practically a joke [00:02:00] player. The, the Yo Kippur War. The Yo Kippur war was hilarious, and we’ll go into it as more of an example of this wider phenomenon, but like Israel little, at that time, Israel was not like the major arms producer it is today.

It didn’t have technology. There were this fledgling little

Simone Collins (2): country.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A fledgling little barely together country. And it looked, felt like, a group of like thugs. You know, there’s a scene, the joke scene in the movie where a group of thugs like chases some, some girl into like a back alley or follows her back there.

And then you just hear a bunch of, like, I was thinking that scene from India comes out

Simone Collins (2): where like that one guy is like dancing around with his knife and then Indiana Jones takes out a gun and shoots him.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s way different for that. I’m, I’m talking about the scene where, because you see this in a lot of movies, a bunch of big, burly guys will like, follow somebody who looks really defenseless into a back alley to jump them.

And then somehow the, the, the girl like knocks out all of them at once.

Speaker 5: Get a load of this guy.

[00:03:00] Oh, humanity. You never failed to disappoint me, .

Unaware that with the slightest nudge, the world could crash down around me. No. For the exercise, gentlemen. I found it bracing.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, keep in mind this was a surprise war. They had more military manpower. They had higher tech, military manpower. Mm-hmm. And they had multiple countries attacking simultaneously. Yeah. And they still lost a ton of territory.

So like, how does this happen? Right. How, how, and then I started to go further because I was like, okay, surely this is just like my [00:04:00] bias and I’m not knowing all these instances of recent Muslim victories. Sure. So I go to AI and I’m like, when was the last time a Muslim force durably took land and kept it from a non-Muslim force?

Okay. Yeah. And so it goes the ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Now, no, I’ll point out why this one doesn’t actually count, but we’ll go through 1517. So, the mammal salt in it nominally Sunni Muslim rulership but ruled a population that was 85 to 90% non-Muslim is. Part of the problem here. At the time Coptic, Christians, Greek and, and Jews.

So, specifically here, Egypt during this time, like even in this example, was actually ruled by Muslims already. It just had a non-Muslim majority population and it was conquered by the Ottomans. And you’ve got a problem with the Ottomans because the Ottomans do what I said that Saudi Arabia should do.

Mm-hmm. I was like. Look, Saudi Arabia, you guys [00:05:00] suck at war. This is how this came up, right? Like I was like, you guys are, are comically bad. You can’t even keep Yemen under control and it’s on your border and destitute and also Muslim. Oh dear. So, so I was like, you should just, you know, put a bunch of Christians, you know, like Protestants and Jews in charge of your troops.

Troops and you do fine. And then I had this, this thought, oh, no, no. Oh no. That’s exactly what the ottomans did. Not you, you thinking Don’t stop. No. So the Ottomans did sort of what like the UAE and the Saudis do. So if you go to the, the Muslim countries that are operating really well and very prosperous these days like Qatar in Saudi Arabia and the UAE anybody who’s been there knows that everything, or a lot of it is actually managed by well, Jews and Protestants who are imported to do finances, logistics, not

Simone Collins (2): like broadly just.

Other people.

Malcolm Collins: We’ll talk about the Catholic situation in a bit. But Catholics,

Simone Collins (2): oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: And they [00:06:00] are I imported. They’re not like, it’s, it’s a longer story there, but yes, this is, this is what’s happening. Okay, so, so if people who are familiar with Autumn in history are, are, are you familiar with the Janice series and how that whole system worked?

Simone Collins (2): Please refresh my memory.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, right before the Ottoman started winning all these wars and expanding their territory, and this is long before the Ottoman conquest in Egypt, which we’ll get to as well. Okay. They adopted a system of taking the children of Christian families young boys and raising them as Muslims.

But if there are, as I’ve argued in the past, likely slight genetic differences between groups where you have an individual begins to adapt to like, like the religion is, like the, the code, and then you’ve got their biology that the code is running on, and the two will sort of synchronize intergenerationally, especially if you can have drift between populations, right?

An example I’ll say here is, imagine I’m living in Massachusetts and I could be a Quaker or a Puritan, [00:07:00] and I happen to hear voices. About 25% of people hear voices. Mm-hmm. I’m way more likely to become a Quaker. And now that trait is genetically concentrated in that population, right? Mm-hmm. So, even if they’re taking the, the young boys from, from Christian populations and immediately attempting to convert them you still have basically the phenomenon in the Ottoman region that you currently have in, because they did the Janis series didn’t just do the troops.

They actually like managed all troop movement, all troop deployment, the way troops operated. They managed parts of the economy. They managed parts of the infrastructure. Wait, so

Simone Collins (2): in, in, in a nutshell, are you trying to argue that Janice areas are largely, historically people of, of Christian descent?

Malcolm Collins: No, they were, they were exclusively people of Christian descent.

Oh. It wasn’t majority. That was the whole point of a Janus area. Oh,

Simone Collins (2): okay, okay, okay.

Malcolm Collins: I didn’t know. And then when did the ottomans begin to fail? Because remember this, this last big conquest here in 1517, the ottomans began to fail when the Janice series [00:08:00] became a hereditary position. And so the Janice series would intermarry with the, the Ottoman women.

Right. And they’d have kids. And then those kids would be 50%, whatever the original population was and then 25%, whatever the original population was. And then within a few generations of that, they begin to lose basically all of their wars. And I’m just saying it’s really weird that this pattern repeats itself so persistently.

But, but now note here, I’m, I’m gonna take a few other examples so the reason, by the way, I did not mention the Ottoman conquest of Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, or Hungary in the 15 or 16th century is because those weren’t lasting conquest. I mean, we all know those areas to be Christian kingdoms today, right? You know, so. Okay. I didn’t really count them. But they also wouldn’t count under the ottoman definition if you’re saying, well, but they were actually led by the, the children of Christians.

Hmm. So you, you after 17 hundreds, Muslim majority states still fought wars, Ottomans versus Russia, Persians versus Afghans, et cetera, but did not gain or retain new territory from [00:09:00] non-Muslim sovereigns. And then I’ll give you two brief exceptions, but they’re not big enough to really break the pattern for me.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Turkey launched a military operation in 1974 in response to Greek junta backed coop on Cyprus. This resulted in torish forces seizing approximately 36 to 37% of the island’s territory, displacing the Greek Cy Cypher population there, a Cyprus at the time, and still had a Christian majority population overall with Orthodox Greeks forming the majority.

Turkey maintained effective control over this area for 51 years. As of 2026. And so that, that kind of counts, but it’s such a small scale thing. I don’t really consider it. And then the second here is in Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and annexation of East to more a Christian majority territory under per Portuguese influence.

But it only lasted about 24 years before independence. And then there was also a recent attack by Azerbaijan of they took a small amount of territory from the

[00:10:00] Armenians.

Malcolm Collins: , I wanna say. But again, Azerbaijan

Simone Collins (2): is an underrated country name. It’s good. It’s got bounce, you know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But anyway, so now, now we’re gonna ask the second question here. Okay. So if we’re gonna say, okay we can’t count Ottoman victories when they had the Janice series running their troops. Alright. So, right, because they’re

Simone Collins (2): basically just. Rebranding. It’s, it’s like a, a Kirkland brand or like generic store brand, except, you know that it was made at the same factory as like Doritos, and so you No, you can’t because it’s literally the same basic product.

Yeah. Rebranded. I get what you’re saying there. Yeah. But,

Malcolm Collins: but it’s not just that, it would be like saying that, you know, wow, Saudis are really good at managing their finances, and it’s like, no, their, their Jewish financial managers are really good at running their finances. Like, or in Saudi Arabia’s case’s, probably not Jewish.

I, I would guess that they’re probably more just Christian. Oh, because they, they, I, my memory’s

Simone Collins (2): so [00:11:00] bad. But isn’t it a Japanese man like that? This, like, so isn’t SoftBank managing a lot of Saudi money?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, it might be Japanese to no difference. Okay. I should have said Japanese in there as well. I, I

Simone Collins (2): can’t remember.

Hold on, let me ask. I, I, because this, this,

Malcolm Collins: but, okay. So we’re gonna ask the next offensive question here, right? So you don’t, you don’t include the ottomans.

Simone Collins (2): What Middle Eastern Nations funds does SoftBank manage?

SoftBank through its SoftBank Vision Fund Fund manages the capital wealth committed by sovereign wealth funds from middle Eastern nations. That’s Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is the largest backer backer of Vision Fund one committing up to $45 billion.

United Arab Emirates. Also committed 15 billion to the vision fund one. Okay. So it’s, it’s not just Saudi Arabia, it’s also the uae. It’s for the

Malcolm Collins: Japanese could help with a large part of their investment. Sorry,

Simone Collins (2): Japanese. They get it done.

Malcolm Collins: They’re great. Love ‘em. [00:12:00] So you don’t include the Ottomans. Right. Okay.

The last clear case of a a, a durable win where they, they ended up holding the territories permanently holding the territory. Okay. Is the Moogle conquest of India back in 1526. Oh. Conquered from the Hindu ruled Deli sate successor regimes. It was held for 230 years.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay, so then you’ve gotta ask, okay, I mean, the 15 hundreds, it’s like yesterday.

Simone Collins (2): You know, I, I’m wearing like 1500 inspired stays under all this, you know,

Malcolm Collins: it’s still fresh. Here are some other close ones. But they said they, they don’t exactly fit. So you have the SDI Persia versus Christian caucuses, 15 hundreds to 16 hundreds where they conquered Georgia Armenia and deported many populations.

But control was contested constantly with the Ottomans in Russia. And they relied heavily with the, on the Armenians for trade administration. E even in the regions they conquered. [00:13:00] Mm-hmm. The Moroccan conquest in West Africa, you have the Moroccan Conquest of Sangai A, but that was a Muslim empire.

So not non-Muslim states. Then you have the Sokoto Cate expansion, 1800 to 1900. Okay. This was a Muslim conquest, but it was predominantly inside a Muslim region. And, and you actually see this with Muslim countries. If you go back, they do fight and win a lot, but it’s usually against other Muslims. And you could go back here and be like, oh, aren’t there some Muslim countries? Like in East Asia, we can I tell you the funniest thing? Yeah, there are. There’s Indonesia and Malaysia. Do you know the only country either of those countries has ever attempted to invade and take over?

Simone Collins (2): No.

Malcolm Collins: Each other? God, Indonesia tried to take over Malaysia through like a series of gorilla campaigns at 1.0

Simone Collins (2): for the love.

Malcolm Collins: But we’re, but it, this should, as we, as we go back here, this should begin to like unroll the, the joke that I’m gonna use in this. Is that the Muslims remind me of the Roan ship

Speaker: . Why do we always get cleanup [00:14:00] duty when they’ve tortured a re? They leave behind the biggest mess.

Speaker 3: Sub command of rec takes pleasure and arm misery. Hopefully he doesn’t get too comfortable for soon. My plans will come to fruition and his life will be disrupted.

Speaker: You are betraying sub command of Rick.

That is a pity because I am already betraying him and my plans will come to fruition first. Oh,

Speaker 3: please don’t make me scoff. Your plans are barely even schemes.

Speaker: You wouldn’t know a scheme from a conspiracy.

Malcolm Collins: From deep from star trek’s lower decks.

Speaker: Assassination plots against me are one thing, but sabotage. Is this your doing, ma? Luck? How dare you? Of course I crave your demise. But not like silence. I’ve been stabbing commanders in the back since before your mother killed her first traitor.

Malcolm Collins: you know, like constantly backstabbing each other.

Simone Collins (2): I mean, what, like, Christians and Protestants don’t do that.

Malcolm Collins: They don’t [00:15:00] actually and we’re gonna go over this.

No. And it’s, no sorry. Christians. Catholics do. Protestants largely don’t. So we’re going to go over at the end of this, which will basically be, I’m gonna give you guys the secret right now. It’s how many times in all of their collective history have every one of these individual religious cultures had a coup?

Oh, which Protestants, there have only been. Really two cos in all of history. And both of them were military coups where the military took over country from an autocratic ruler and either gave it to, or tried to give it to an elected body. Whereas if you look at Muslim countries, they basically have a coup every other year.

And because of that, you cannot put competent people in control of the military. Catholics have coups about once a gener, well, once every couple generations. Oh my gosh. They’re like way more likely to have coups. You have like, think about Latin America, [00:16:00] like coups all the time, right? Like, the weird thing is like when Protestants do revolutions, they do not do military coups.

So consider like the United States Revolution, right? We didn’t like take over the local military troops like the local commands and say, okay, now there are troops. We raised independent troops to fight against them. Yeah. You regularly see this in revolutions within Protestant areas is they do not try to take over an existing part of the standing military.

They try to rage a new force out of nowhere.

Which contrasts heavily with both Catholic and Muslim majority countries. But because we don’t have a lot of Muslim majority , , colonies in the Americas, we can’t point to one. But if you look at the Catholic majority countries in the Americas, , when they would have revolutions unlike the United States, they would often co-opt existing military infrastructure to conduct the revolution instead of raising a military from scratch.

Malcolm Collins: Jews are the same way. Jews as far as I know, [00:17:00] there’s not a single case , in human history of a Jew ever doing a military coup

Simone Collins (2): and Jewish coup.

Malcolm Collins: But when a population doesn’t do coups, and we’ll talk about why they, they may not do coups. It’s actually a very interesting thing, and I probably have more episodes on this ‘cause I don’t exactly know why Protestants never do military coups.

Towards the end of the episode, Simone comes up with what I find to be a really, really intelligent reason why.

Simone Collins (2): You wanna dig deeper? Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe there are some obscure examples or. Examples of it, we wouldn’t,

Malcolm Collins: examples, we’ll get to the obscure examples and they are weird. Like, one was like a, a, a grader guy who tried to take over an island for like a day. It like, they’re small fail weird and bizarre.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: One of the two military coups that I mentioned, so I’ll just go over the only two Protestant ones that were real coups. One was Oliver Cromwell, but that wasn’t really a military coup because the elected parliament asked him to do it, and then he immediately spent the rest of his life trying to set up a DA democracy, [00:18:00] but they just kept fighting with each other and then he replaced them, and then he Poor Cromwell, basically like George Washington.

You know how both sides started to fight. As soon as Washington handed it over. Yeah, yeah. Folks went back to Washington and it was like, okay, we’re fighting, we’re fighting, we’re fighting. We really want to there’s a good movie what is it? What’s the movie we watched on Early American History named after one of the founders?

Simone Collins (2): John Adams.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. John Adams. And so they both basically go to George Washington and they’re like, Hey, can you please come back and take this over? Like, we cannot stop fighting. I need you to come out here and say who’s right. And he’s just like, I won’t do it.

Right. Like, I hands off. I see it’s dysfunctional. I see it looks like it’s falling apart. You have to make this work or else Yeah, umwell, he just kept coming back in and trying to fix it. And then the other one was in, I wanna say Sweden. We’ll get to it. But they just deposed the king and then replaced him with his uncle.

But put in place something like a Magna Carta that just said, basically the king has a lot less powers. Oh, okay. Basically the opposite of a normal military coup. But I’m gonna get going here because it, it gets, it gets worse. Right. So, so. Okay. [00:19:00] We have this case in India and I was like, okay, let’s go back here.

Let’s go back and say a Christian majority population. Right. Because that’s what we’re really interested in. Yeah. When was the last time a Muslim army, you know, read, run by Muslims who were born to Muslim families conquered a Christian region, right? Right. Yeah. When the umay conquest of Iberia, Spain and Portugal in 711 or 718.

Simone Collins (2): What? Oh, oh dear.

Malcolm Collins: So that, that they did control it for 500, 800 reasons, but the problem is wait for 500

Simone Collins (2): to 800 years that

Malcolm Collins: puts them was in Yeah. They control it for a long time. Okay. That, that means that, that the last territorial expansions through conquest that Muslims had was 79 years after Mohammad’s life.

Almost all of the territorial conquests that Muslims did through [00:20:00] war happened within two generations of Muhammad dying 79 years. So let’s go over some other ones that don’t count here. So, there were North African conquests, but those were Muslim. You have Middle East, Persian, India, but those were Hindu Buddhists, some sort of AAN or Christian mixed regions.

And then you, you had the caucuses, but the caucuses were not stable or long lasting. So basically since Muhammad, you just have a long period of retreat. Now let’s get into why that happened. By the way, any thoughts before I go further here?

Simone Collins (2): My first thought was, well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if they’re not physically taking land at this point in human history because the argument we have always made.

As ISTs is, it’s so ironic that people have fought and killed over land when at this point in human history, all you have to do is have an above replacement birth rate and you will inherit the whole world. It doesn’t matter ‘cause no one else is gonna be there in all that land used [00:21:00] to fight and kill, to take.

However caveat Mormon birth rates are not. Or sorry, but not Mor Mormon. Muslim birth rates are not the thing that people think they’re, everyone’s like, oh, Muslims are gonna take over. Yeah. And they’re really not, they’re not good birth rates. So at first I was like, oh, it’s okay, because my mind was just defaulting to like the unfounded in the end assumption that Muslims are, are repopulating the earth when they’re really not.

So I’m like, well, we can’t do that then. So they’re still screwed. And that, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

They do, however, have a high birth rate when they’re living off the state in non-Muslim majority areas, eg. Germany, France, the uk, Sweden, et cetera. , but they do not have a high birth rate was in their own countries.

Simone Collins (2): Well, the

Malcolm Collins: Muslims who live like, you know, Orthodox Jews or the Amish, like the really, really strict ones have high birth rates. But the ones who inherit the future, like the people who inherit the future, you need two things.

You need high birth rates and being economically and technologically productive. Yes. And if a, get your high birth rates by being economically unproductive, they are irrelevant [00:22:00] in terms of global control. Yes. And I note here as, as we go further with all of this, there is, this is to say like, suppose you’re a Muslim and you’re like, well then what do I do?

Right? Like, how do I make this work? And it’s like, Muslims have Convergently found a really good way to operate, right? Which is to put non-Muslims in charge of most of the, the, the major operating functions of the economy and support a Muslim elite ruling class. Muslims actually do okay as an elite.

Okay? So they’re just really good delegators. Really good delegators. That’s, that’s it.

Simone Collins (2): They, they, they spot good talent. They utilize talent well, and they, they delegate and manage well.

Malcolm Collins: But you, you, you’ve got to be very careful and not do what the Ottomans did because the Ottomans accidentally cued their entire empire where the class that they delegated to originally, they said they couldn’t get married and have kids.

Mm-hmm. And Dana became hereditary and then they took over a bunch of stuff. Mm-hmm. And, and that was not. Maybe the best thing to do is to take [00:23:00] war slaves and then put them at the top of your empire and have them be significantly more competent and, and have a lot more money to get power and military might than anyone else.

And that is what in large part led to a part of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. But also Rudyard had a piece on Muslims recently, and I think he is a fantastic historian if you’re interested in getting deep dives into history. The one who I would say is Rubar Samo conversations.

These videos get like a few thousand views, way less in our videos. And they are the most intellectually dense conversations you’re gonna see about history. I, not a historian. Okay. I consider myself much more of a cross-cultural anthropologist with my real expertise being in neuroscience and biology.

Which is funny because we don’t talk about that a lot on the show. But. My background in biology and neuroscience, you often see on how I view anthropology because I view cultures and religions as evolving sort of organisms. And so whenever I make an analogy, [00:24:00] people will notice that my analogies are almost always biological analogies when I point out, like early Muslims exploding onto the scenes like an invasive species.

You know, I’m, I’m using an analogy because I’m, I’m, I’m looking at them and what I immediately see when I look at Muslims or, or Vikings, is an extremophile like you would have with an animal that adapted to a very unique climate extremely erit or extremely cold, extremely harsh. And then encountered groups that didn’t have some of their adaptations that they were able to change in certain ways to explode on the scene.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: One of the things that’s important about early Muslim explosion is that the kingdoms that they ruled were not majority Muslims. So during the period where you have the Islamic golden Age, during the period where you have rapid Muslim expansion they were the minority in most of the regions they controlled.

And not only were they a minority, but they were a minority that did a very good job of finding competent operators to put in positions of power. And they were very, very big about doing [00:25:00] this with Jews. One, one of the things I point out is, is, is Judaism of today is more closer like philosophically.

If you’re looking at the culture of it, it’s closer to Protestant culture than either are to, to Catholic culture or Muslim culture. Really. You go to this period, the early Muslim expansion period. Islam and Judaism were actually very, very, very similar in the way they were practiced, the way they were thought about the way that they operated.

It to the extent where if you go to any of like Maimonides or something, or non monies if, if you go to like any of like the great Jewish scholars for this period they’re always defining Jewish theology. In contrast to Islamic theology and, and, and not in a disparaging manner to Islamic theology.

Specifically they really liked that they saw Muslims as true monotheist instead of what I call them trans monotheists. A a lot of Christians are where they actually have multiple supernatural entities that they’ll deal [00:26:00] with. But they just define those entities as not god’s and therefore they say, I’m not a.

Polytheist. Right? Even though most polytheistic societies have a creator God that makes the other supernatural entities. And so that the Jews of this time like that, the Muslims of this time to do this. Now Muslims don’t do that anymore, but they did this time. But anyway, in Rudy’s video on this, I love, he’s like, I’m gonna try to not offend Muslims in this.

You know? He’s like, I’m, I really respect your culture. What I love is, you know, you’re getting on this video. I respect nobody’s culture. I don’t respect my own culture. I will attack the Jews, I will attack the Muslims. I will attack the Catholics. I have called my own people like Savage Woods, people who will murder you and eat you if you get lost in the woods like that.

And I’m like, and there’s da to back this up. So the point I’m making here is I try to take the opposite perspective of Ruby Yard as being like an intellectual who can go into things while taking a, a, a harsh eye to everything. ‘cause I think that’s, that’s how we improve. But anyway, so, the, the reason why in every period where Muslim culture has really worked is they were very good delegators and they were very good delegators during the Islamic cultural explosion.

And so a lot [00:27:00] of people they saw this and they say, Hey, well this means that the Muslims they didn’t actually Muslim golden age, they were just taking over the scientific institutions of other organizations within those, those places. You know, whether it’s Persia or Greece or anything like that.

To which I would say, well, if you say that. Then you can’t give Catholicism any credit for anything. It’s done in its entire history. Mm-hmm. Because you could, it’s a nepo baby of the Roman Empire, and they were just taking the Roman

Simone Collins (2): institution, the Nepo baby. It’s the Roman Empire Catholicism.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I don’t, I don’t hold that, that position was really either, I think it was Catholicism.

It is actually more arguable than it is with Islam.

Specifically what I mean by this statement, if you know your history of science and medicine, , the development of it significantly dropped after the Catholic Church took over the Roman Empire in the areas where it was being produced. , But the significant, the amount of it significantly increased in the Muslim areas, , like Persia and, , parts of Greece [00:28:00] when they took over.

. But IE it, they were producing more academic works after the Muslims took over than before. So even if they are sort of nepo babying it, at least they didn’t collapse it like the Catholics did.

And I mean, seriously, just think about it. , If we’re not talking about, ‘cause people act like the Muslims just came in at like the end of classical Greece or something like that. They, they did not, this period had been pretty dead for a long time. Post-classical Greece, premus, can you think of any great mathematicians from these regions?

Can you think of any great scientists? You could probably think of like 15 off the top of your head from the Muslim, golden Age. And it’s the same with the, the Roman Empire. I can think of lots of great, , you know, artists, writers, , scientists from, , , the early Roman Empire from the height of the Roman Empire.

But once you get into the Christian period, there are some, it’s not a complete drought, but it’s, it’s not as many.

And I have to [00:29:00] be clear, it really does seem to be the, a arising of specifically the Catholic sentiment around knowledge of being extremely focused on,, the sort of knowledge of those before you. So you take somebody like, you know, like the development of medicine in Rome and you go up to Galen and then, you know, just a few generations after him, Constantine comes into power and there’s basically no medicine.

, Developed in this region for the next century or so. I.

Malcolm Collins: Were really allowed for the Islamic golden age of science to happen. Mm-hmm. Was that the Muslims of this period, because they were a minority ruling class, tried to play the minority classes off of each other instead of having sort of a, a, a total control?

Right. You know, I mean, so they would say, who’s the, the smartest Jew here? Who’s the smartest Christian of this type here? Who’s the smartest? And they specifically would try to elevate groups based on how minority they were. So the smaller a group was, the [00:30:00] better they were to put into a position of like, pseudo power because they’d be more grateful for it. So like suppose you come in and you conquer Spain, and Spain is majority Christian and you have a minority Jewish population. Right. So, who is least likely to help a rebellion if you give them disproportionate rights? The Jews. Right. Because if you give the Jews more rights than the Christians the Christians are, if, if they win a rebellion, it goes back to being a Christian territory.

Mm-hmm. But if you make things nicer for the minorities that were there before you got there, not now they have a, a vested interest in not seeing you leave. Mm-hmm. Right. And, and you don’t just do this for Jews, you do this for minority Christian populations. ‘cause Spain has a bunch of different groups that all hate each other and they’ve hated each other forever.

And that’s why they’re always on the break of splitting up. We’re not gonna get into that right now. The point being is that is what allowed for the Islamic golden age. The, the great periods of success was in Islam were when they were the minority. But this is the problem that you get largely with Islam, but it’s not just with Islam.

Everyone does this. [00:31:00] I love everyone points. Islam does this, everybody does this. Is they say that, well, what Islam does is they come in and they treat everyone. Because when you’re a minority, your goal is to respect minorities. It’s to respect other people’s ways. And then when you become a majority, then you stop respecting other people’s ways.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Classic dynamic.

Malcolm Collins: Classic dynamic. But and our society, we saw this was like the Wokes, right? Like when the leftist cultures you know, the LGBT culture, the, the, the, the sort of the wider culture around that was like a fringe culture before they dominated our cultural institutions and everything like that, right?

It was. You know, we just want to be able to live our own way. And, and they genuinely believed that’s what they were fighting for. The same way the Muslims of that period likely believed, Hey, we just want everyone to, you know, get along. And now that they feel they have power, you know, they’ll defend somebody jacking off in a woman’s restroom, right?

Like, it’s happened recently. They’re like, that’s a totally normal thing to do, right? And it’s like, well, it’s actually like, like I could see why women feel really unsafe in that environment. Yeah. [00:32:00] But anyway, the, the point here being is everybody does this, right? This is, this is why when I point out, Hey guys, you really don’t want to put X group in power.

When they have had unilateral,

I’m getting carried away and about to miss closing the point here, which is that Islam. We have all these stories about how nice they were as rulers and how nice they were to Christians and how nice they were to Jews. , When they ruled these territories, and this is actually true, when they were still the minority in these territories, when they became the majority in these territories because they were rulers, while they were still minorities, when they became the majority in these territories, they typically became.

Quite abusive to the existing populations. In fact, the only population I can think of that is really consistently decent to minority populations when they’re the majority population is sometimes Protestants. , Look at like Cromwell’s England or something. [00:33:00] Inviting the Jews back in and trying to create some degree of religious, , freedom laws when he had the ability.

To just completely quash anything that wasn’t his own beliefs, and he didn’t.

Malcolm Collins: like the reason why the US. Had such an explosion was because it was a multicultural society and those cultures worked cohesively with each other. Yeah. And I’m not saying you just want more cultures for the sake of more cultures. Right. Like the original founding cultures of America were just like really good cultures to work alongside each other.

Yeah. Right. They, they were not like, if, if you imported a bunch of people from i, I, I don’t know where, but somewhere into early America, it probably would’ve fallen. Well, but the other thing about multiculturalism is it needs to be multiculturalism whiz, strict cultural hierarchies and understanding that you are part of your culture within that society.

Right. So like, you mean

Simone Collins (2): sort of knowing who you belong to, but also there being these distinct groups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To belong. Suppose

Malcolm Collins: [00:34:00] you’re in an early Islamic, like one of these multicultural environments Right. Where they actually make work.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, if I as a Christian, or I as a Jew you know, was like, oh, I’m just gonna go rob people, right?

Like, I don’t care. And I allowed my community to become like an unsafe community, right? Like you, you don’t walk through the Jewish neighborhood because they’ll, they’ll stab you and take all your stuff, right? Mm-hmm.

You know. They would’ve said, oh, like the Muslims in charge, they would’ve said, oh, Jews are a problem.

Let’s do like a grom or something like that. Right? And, and you could say that now in our society, if there is an ethnic group or a cultural group that allows their neighborhood to become dangerous, right? We should just be able to say, Hey, X people are a problem. They’re being a problem for everyone else.

And we should treat them differently than other groups. And, and in our society, we call that racism, right? But the, the reason why that form of racism actually made society work or, or not race, like. Anti-religion or anti culturalism worked is because then you had [00:35:00] a reason to interculturally police when, you know, if you allow your neighborhood to become a dangerous place, if you don’t interculturally police, that the surrounding cultures will take that out on all of your people.

And you have a strong community identity that your community alters will build up systems for dealing with that. And this is what historically happened in these many of these Muslim empires like you had the millet system and stuff like that, which we’ll get into in a separate episode. But the, the, the point here being is multiculturalism kind of requires racism to work.

It requires cultural accountability. Right. And that’s a really

Simone Collins (2): interesting point. Yeah. That, that well, I guess we should say functional and productive multiculturalism that moves humanity on the whole forward. Also requires some level of, not just, I, I don’t know if racism is the word, but like, in internal or, or natural, but unforced, segregation, pride, [00:36:00] minor amounts of xenophobia.

And, and, and maybe some, some racism. Or at least No, I mean, in early America

Malcolm Collins: had this, right? Like this is the thing. No, totally.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Yeah. The, the Quakers freaking hated the race. The, the the, the Puritans and the Puran Puran hated the Quakers,

Malcolm Collins: for example, this is not a race-based thing. The Puritans of the Quakers effing hated each other.

Oh, they, they were

Simone Collins (2): at each other’s throats. Yeah. There were some hilarious anecdotes of this. They would

Malcolm Collins: like, they’d literally like tore in feather, like if a a, a quake, a pur, a Quaker went into Puritan territory. Yeah. Like, you know, strip them naked, pour boiling oil on them. Oh. And the

Simone Collins (2): Quakers hated the Scots Irish.

They were like, these guys are worse than the Indians

Malcolm Collins: can

Simone Collins (2): stand them. Well, the

Malcolm Collins: Such Irish were constantly killing the Quakers. Well, I mean,

Simone Collins (2): it’s so fun. How can you help yourself?

Malcolm Collins: They

Simone Collins (2): don’t fight back.

Malcolm Collins: It’s hilarious. Sport people, the point here being is that every one of these early groups in America had very strong prejudices against the other groups.

Oh yeah. ‘cause the Cavaliers were

Simone Collins (2): so confident that they were [00:37:00] better than everyone else.

Malcolm Collins: They were so confident they were better than everyone else. And they were, and all, all of these major cultural groups in early America were white. The, the capital, yeah. The Puritans, the Quakers and the backwards people.

Simone Collins (2): I mean there were also, you know, the, the, the African slaves. I mean, separately you had the indentured servants who were also like, I mean, let’s just hope you die so I don’t have to give you your land. And then there were the slaves, which were like, you know, there were periods in early American

Malcolm Collins: history where only one in seven indentured servants survived.

Yeah. I, I might do an episode on this later, but like by many metrics, if you. Certain periods of American history your probability and your quality of life of, of, of living and having a good life was higher if you were coming over on an African slave ship than as an indentured servant.

Simone Collins (2): Well, you have to look at the incentives.

The, the problem with indentured servitude was as an indentured servant, the agreement was you would do a certain number of years of work for a family household, parcel of land, whatever. And then you were entitled to [00:38:00] certain things, including land, sometimes money, and if you were dead, they didn’t have to give you those things.

Yes. So, to, to,

Malcolm Collins: Just to be very clear about this, where people are unaware of how bad intention are. Two, what is early America? It was typically a period of seven years and. The master had to give you I think a couple acres of land. Of their land. Yeah. Unless you died. Yeah. Then there was no who, negative consequence to the earth.

That’s

Simone Collins (2): an adverse incentive right there, friend. That’s an adverse incentive. It’s like if, if, if I am purchased instead as a slave, the person who purchased me spent money to acquire me already, like the, the investment was already made. I’m now a sunk cost. And they’re like, well, I don’t wanna lose my investment.

And yeah, they, I, I am. Yeah, they wanna, I mean, I’m gonna depreciate over time, I guess like as I age and get worn down by all the horrible work you make me do and stuff. But like, I, I’m not a liability. You’re a liability as an indentured [00:39:00] servant. You are better off being sort of worked to death. Whereas slaves, like if you work, let, let’s just, let’s just take the humanity out of this, right?

Like, let’s say you buy an optimist from. Elon Musk I don’t know what is the company that makes ‘em, is, is it Tesla that’s makes C from Tesla? You’re not gonna wanna break it, you know, like work it until it breaks and like, not take care of it. Not charge it and not maintain it. Right. Because you paid a lot of money for it upfront.

But like, if, if it was only something that you had to pay for after seven years and assuming it still functioned, wouldn’t you like work it really heavily and kind of hope that it broke before you had to pay for it? Like, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it’s like, yeah, it’s that’s a good way to put it. Like, you get one of these and you don’t have to pay for it if it’s broken at the end of seven years.

Yeah. Very weird payment structure. I’m gonna be honest. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And was even worse if there was virtually no [00:40:00] accountability because the people who were indentured servants weren’t like from the local community. They were from like places in like. The rural parts of, like Scotland and Ireland mm-hmm.

Where their parents wouldn’t be able to get back at you. No one in their community when you put out the next indentured servant ad would know what happened to the last indentured servant.

Simone Collins (2): So well there, there wasn’t exactly accountability with mistreatment of slaves either. However, there again, it’s just like the, the incentives were not as adverse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but we’re not saying slavery was good. No. Here. No, no. But the point I’m making here, when I talk about RA racism in the world, you need prejudice for multiculturalism to work because then there’s cultural accountability. That’s what prejudice is. It’s cultural accountability. And it was really sort of stupid of society to say that there should be no, that you can’t be like, there is a trend within this community because as soon as you can say that, then you can address the trends, right, interculturally.

Basically, if you made it this far in this episode, it’s about to get about 30 times more spicy

Speaker 6: My hot take is probably that goblins are basic running society. I mean, who [00:41:00] runs Gringotts Goblins? The Daily Prophet Goblin, literally the entir