Why are Muslims So Poor? (How Did Islam Go From Running the World to Poverty?)

In this video, Al and Simone tackle a difficult historical question: Why did once-wealthy Muslim empires decline into poverty? They discuss misconceptions about the economic downfall and explore the historical context, including the wealth and advancements of Muslim empires around the year 1000. They also cover various socio-economic factors such as inheritance laws, usury laws, colonialism, and the alliance between religious and political authorities. The episode delves into specific challenges facing Muslim-majority countries compared to the historical context and also includes a discussion on modern Muslim income levels in the U.S. and the impact of governance and religious practices. The video concludes with thoughts about potential reforms and the importance of adapting religious interpretations to today's technological and socio-economic realities.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo Simone. Today we are going to be asking a question and I really do not know how to word this. Um, Why

are Muslims so poor?

 don't you get a job? If you're so hungry, why don't you get a job? Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude.

Speaker: That's what's stopping you. You gotta get your act together.

Malcolm Collins: But somebody may, may look at this and be like, that's a silly question. You know, obviously Muslim regions of the world were never wealthy and colonialism and the Muslims are coming from poor countries and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, except none of those things actually explain the question at hand because.

In fact, at the year 1000, the Muslim empires were probably, by a pretty easy margin, the wealthiest place in the world. They [00:01:00] made up 10 percent of global GDP. Baghdad had between half a million and a million inhabitants around the year 1000. So that was larger than any city in Western Europe. And then what about Western Europe?

Well, the largest city in Western Europe at the time was actually an Islamic city. Cordoba. Which is in present day Spain, which had around half a million people living in it. Wow. They also were so O. P. In the sciences. You know, not just like inventing irrigation or more modern irrigation algebra modern medicine but they were so op in the sciences that western european authors when they would write in the sciences would write under fake islamic name So that people would take their work seriously,

Simone Collins: nice

Malcolm Collins: Which I just find absolutely hilarious.

And so for some of these old texts, we don't actually know if they were written by European scholars or Islamic scholars because all the European scholars had to write under Muslim [00:02:00] names because everyone just knew it like Muslim science better. And well, and this is where you get, you know, the owl prefix, that's algebras alchemy, which is basically chemistry of that period.

But, and if you're like, oh, colonialism, but by the 1700s, the Islamic world share of the GDP had dropped from 10 percent to just 2. 2%, and that was well before the era of colonialism.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So you can't blame this on colonialism something happened in between the year 1, 000 and the year 17, 000, which turned Islam from the global superpower cultural group, both in terms of technological output and in terms of economic output to a backwater.

And some individuals might say, well, but, but, but, you know. The European tradition is based on a much older you know, like they, they, they go, can go all the way back to classical Greece and [00:03:00] they just have an older tradition to draw from. Right. Or, or they could argue that well, Christianity maybe has an older tradition to draw from, but.

The problem , is that the Muslim world happens to have grown out of, where? Mesopotamia and Egypt! Much older traditions to draw from! Oh dear. You have the Persian Empire, which was, in many ways, significantly more advanced than the Greek Empire. I mean, that's what makes the Greco Persian wars for me, the most interesting period in history is you have this conflict that it's this existential conflict between two regions that are superpowers in totally unique and different ways.

Right. And, and it, it, it plays out so well. It's like a, a RPG where You know, like when, okay, when Starcraft came out in terms of like resource management, RPGs, that was like the first time I really remember playing one of those were like the different races that you could play as actually had like totally unique units to them.

And [00:04:00] in most of the other periods in history, when you're looking at wars or something like that, it is broadly similar units against broadly similar units. But when you go to the Greco Persian war, you are dealing with. Totally different civilizational structures and totally different, it's like it's different as the Terran and the Protoss, like, it, it is, it is, it is fascinating to me that this ever happened in human history and we can get to relive this and I might do other lectures on that.

So it is a meaningful effing question to ask. All right. But. I will point something out to start which might go against what some individuals say. So if you're looking within the United States, first of all Muslims, when you're talking about poverty levels do fall into poverty levels at slightly higher rates than other groups.

Specifically, 33 percent of American Muslims have a total household income of under 30, 000. That is compared to 12 percent of Jews, 20 percent of Catholics. 21 percent was in white evangelicals. So it is higher than those groups. But that [00:05:00] said overall, Muslims, at least within the United States are largely a middle class group.

So I will go over some other statistics from. The, the core reason that they're actually lower income in the United States is because a few things. One, they are on average younger with 35 percent between 18 and 29 compared to 21 percent of the general population. And younger people tend to have lower incomes.

They are largely immigrants. Many Muslims are recent immigrants, which can impact lower incomes. And among American Muslims, black Muslims in particular report lower incomes with 41 percent earning lower than 30, 000 annually. And again, this isn't because black people intrinsically earn less.

Uh, We will do another video on why black people in the U. S. earn less that is really interesting and might subvert some of your expectations around this.

Because I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but the stats are actually really interesting if you go in there with a non woke but also non biased perspective.

And then it all [00:06:00] sort of falls into place and it sort of paints the wokies as the primary bad guys and why the African American income is so low. But Education Muslim educational attainment in the United States is similar to other American groups. And the 2007 Pew research found that Muslim American income levels generally mirrored the general public.

So, for example, 14 percent of Muslims reported a household income of 100, 000 or more compared to 16 percent of the overall U. S. 40 percent of Muslim Americans reported family incomes between 30 and 100, 000 compared to 48 percent of the general public. And Yeah, so just generally speaking, and the survey actually says, quote, Muslim Americans have a general.

So not only are Muslims generally around the average American income, a little lower because you'd expect it because they're young and mostly immigrants so in the United States Muslims are generally comparable with the rest of the population, which again, is going to bring us to a more pointed question. Why then? Are [00:07:00] Muslim majority countries so low income on average?

Now we might be able to begin to see a few signs of what might be causing this when we look at countries other than America with large Muslim immigrant populations, like the United Kingdom. In 2018, only 55 percent of Muslims 16 to 64 were employed compared to 70. 9 percent of the overall population.

And this is particularly Are specifically because of Muslim women in the United Kingdom, which had really bad unemployment rates with 70 percent out of employment compared to 27 percent of Christian women. And when employed in the UK, Muslims tend to have lower earnings than any of the other religious groups.

And in 2018, Muslim employees had the lowest median hourly earnings of only 9. 6. And this was approximately half the median hourly earnings of some other religious groups.

Simone Collins: Okay, that's striking. Everything else I could think of in my head of, well, it could be this, it could be that, but what is going on there?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so first [00:08:00] I think it's because right here, what we're seeing is a bifurcation of immigration lower income immigrants or immigrants with lower skills are going to travel to countries that are easier to get to and that have higher social services. The United States, when contrasted with Europe, just has lower social services and it's harder to get to.

So it's going to disproportionately sort for higher quality immigrants. When they're coming from that far away. So that is one thing. But then again, that doesn't really explain anything that explains why immigrants in the United States are higher quality and why immigrants in the UK are and when I say quality, I mean, in terms of their impact on the economy, not as like human beings.

But Muslims in the UK are and are generally more of a drain on society as an immigrant group, not because of their Muslim status, but because of the selective immigration constraints created by the dichotomy between the option to immigrate to the United States versus the United Kingdom, where you could have access to a much better economy if you do [00:09:00] well and are well educated, but you're going to be in a much worse situation if you're not earning as much money.

Speaker 4: Um,

Malcolm Collins: So now we get to the bigger crux and it's like, okay, so we solved the immigrant question. Right. And the answer wasn't particularly interesting, but now we need to ask why the old Muslim empires ended up losing their wells.

Simone Collins: Yeah, especially having such this promising period and they, this, you would think at that time, like, if you probably looked at people in the world at that time, they would think, well, these are the people.

Kind of like during the height of the Roman Empire, like, obviously everything's going to be run by these people forever and for always because there's Yeah, you

Malcolm Collins: would really think that. I mean, that was the path that the Muslim Empire was on a way Like, they were the successors of the Roman Empire in terms of the technological and sort of,

Simone Collins: momentum.

Societal, everything. Cultural, societal, technological, all of it.

Malcolm Collins: All of it. Yeah. And they were bigger geographically than the Roman empire at their height. So like they had no, no [00:10:00] reason not to, to be cleaning up. It was their game to

Simone Collins: lose for sure.

It was their

Malcolm Collins: game to lose. So how did they lose it? It doesn't have anything to do with the religion itself is the interesting question.

Simone Collins: Oh, danger, but okay. Let's look at that.

Malcolm Collins: Interesting. So. To give you an idea of how much they lost the average per capita GDP in Muslim majority countries is 5, 000 lower than the global average.

Ugh, ouch. Only 14 percent of Muslims live under democratic systems, compared to 60 percent of the world's countries being governed democratically. And keep in mind, this is, yeah, when contrasted with that golden age. And so, And it's not even like their countries are uniquely resource poor like there are lots of wealthy Muslims out there

Speaker 5: Carnegie Fifth Avenue.

 We love the fashion.

Speaker 7: Louis Vuitton! Yes! Yes!

And there, underneath hundreds of years of tradition, [00:11:00] was this year's spring collection.

Malcolm Collins: But they well, the, the, the vast majority of the wealthiest Muslims attain their wealth by purview of being near oil rich regions or natural gas rich regions.

Now I will say that Dutch disease has not affected Muslim countries as much as other countries. And this reminds me, what is Dutch disease? That sounds like a tree disease. Doesn't it? But Dutch disease is what happens to a country when it happens to have too much Natural resources. If a country has natural, I think

Simone Collins: the Netherlands is doing pretty fricking well right now.

What are you talking about now? It is. I want Dutch disease. I mean, give it, it had a period

Malcolm Collins: where it wasn't,

Simone Collins: Give me the

Malcolm Collins: semiconductors.

Simone Collins: Give me the Ozempic. Give me the fricking tulips. Can we get all of it? I want all of it. So,

Malcolm Collins: Dutch disease doesn't necessarily have to turn into Dutch disease. Some countries that have it, if they are disciplined, have been able to turn it into an [00:12:00] enormous national benefit.

You know, whether it's the Scando countries or the Netherlands and their oil deposits, right? They have been able to create big national trust funds and everything like that. But some countries you know, this usually happens in places like Africa, if they have you know, like a lot of oil or a lot of precious minerals, it almost prevents the country from developing because there now is no reason to build out a tax base.

If you are the monarch of the country or you know, give this feels

Simone Collins: to me, analogous to. Kids born into wealth, right?

Speaker 8: I want one! I want a golden ghost! I want my geese to lay gold eggs for Easter. At least a hundred a day. Anything you say. And by the way,

Simone Collins: There are some kids born into wealth who go on and do really amazing things.

Speaker 8: ! I want the world. I want the whole world. I want to lock it all up in my pocket. Give it to me now.

Simone Collins: And if one calls them a nepo baby and blames them for that, but actually they, they [00:13:00] took their privilege and they built something with it.

Right.

Speaker 8: I want today. I want tomorrow.

Simone Collins: And then there's the other depo babies. Who just blow through their trust funds and are complete losers and don't do anything with their lives. And you know, what is the difference? Is it trust administration? Is it personal discipline? Is it family culture? I think it's the same. Well,

Malcolm Collins: and that's a good point.

Like people can say, Oh, this is like the, the Hollywood youth, like they see a Hollywood youth who like became a burnout and is like all addicted to drugs now and everything like that. And they're like, ah, you see, this is because he was a superstar when he was young, but then if you pointed another Hollywood youth who was successful, they're like, oh, his success can be discounted because he was a Hollywood youth.

And it's like, well. I mean, you can't hold both of those positions simultaneously. Either growing up in that position is actually pretty difficult and can lead to negatives or it's a positive. So Dutch disease has had a middling effect [00:14:00] in, in Africa. It's had a pretty bad effect on some Muslim majority countries, but generally, if you're looking at like the MENA countries in the Middle East they have dealt with it.

Okay, not as well as the Netherlands or the Scando countries, but better than most of the African countries. And maybe they'll be able to build some alternate economic model. They are trying right now, but you know who's to say, but the point here being, it's not a lack of a resource rich areas that has caused their current situation.

So we'll get right into it. Why specifically did the Muslim empire lose so much of its wealth between the year 1000 and 1700s? First, Islamic inheritance laws and polygyny contributed to the lack of large companies., A lot of the ideas in this are going to be drawn from a VisioPolitik episode.

On this particular topic that was just absolutely [00:15:00] fantastic. It's one of my favorite channels on YouTube. However they did make some mistakes and didn't discuss the subject as thoroughly as I'd like. And this was actually one of the mistakes they made is you know, they, they, they point out, Oh, well in Islam, you have to distribute your assets equally among your heirs.

And. Well, not really. You have to distribute your assets equally among your male heirs, and then the female heirs get half what the male heirs get, and the wife gets one eighth if you have kids, and one quarter if you didn't have kids. It's yeah, it's, it's complicated the way Islamic inheritance works.

Simone Collins: Okay, and I'm not saying it's enlightened when you look at Regency era inheritance laws and also left people quite screwed and they were the main turning point for many

Malcolm Collins: Well,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, it

Malcolm Collins: was enlightened when contrasted with European inheritance. Yeah No,

Simone Collins: European inheritance laws are certainly not my point is that I'm saying that those are they sound really crappy But I'm not [00:16:00] saying that non muslim inheritance laws weren't also crappy and probably well definitely worse

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, so a lot of people might hear this and they might be like, that sounds like it's a lot more egalitarian than European laws at the time.

Why is that a bad thing? Well, the story I always go to on this is when the English conquered the Irish, one of the laws that they imposed on them that was meant to ensure that none of them could ever become wealthy was that they forced the families to distribute assets to all male heirs equally. Upon the death of an individual.

And some people are like, why would that make a family poor? And it's like, well, because the previous system was that you consolidated the assets with the oldest heir. And so that meant that intergenerationally a family's wealth could always grow. If you have to split it between and keep in mind how many heirs you have in every one of these, these families, like six, seven, if you split it between a bunch of kids, well, then it's going to dilute pretty quickly.

Well, this gets worse. If you come from a polygynous society where Muslim cultures were [00:17:00] polygynous, they'd have multiple wives and you could have even more kids. So if you establish a great, great, great amount of wealth, well, now you're splitting them into all of your many, many, many, many, many kids. You are really going to have trouble building intergenerational wealth.

And it gets worse. So, the way that the Vigiel Paltik episode said, which is kind of wrong, they said that you had to dissolve the companies that people owned when they died, which isn't exactly accurate, but it's pretty close to accurate. When somebody dies under this system, the shares of the company have to be equally distributed among the youth.

And usually the easiest ways to do that is to dissolve or sell the company. Yeah. And. This is like a religious law.

Speaker 4: Okay. You can't get

Malcolm Collins: around this easily. So it means that most people within the Ottoman period and they, the Islamic scholars have developed better ways of dealing with this now to better match Western business customs, but [00:18:00] within the Ottoman period you know, it often made sense to just not really focus on building intergenerational wealth in the way that other people did.

And I think for you and me, one of the places where we saw this most starkly, do you remember when we went to that giant? Palace complex in the desert in Morocco, I want to say, and if you looked, you could climb up on the ruins of the area that we were in. Somebody was living in the ruins. It was one of the descendants of the person who originally owned it.

Yeah. And the entire complex was, was sort of divided into a grid like pattern. Because every generation, It had been split and split and split again. And some of the sections were beautiful, all in their original glory. And then other sections were almost entirely rubble. And other sections were in varying states of disrepair.

And you realize, oh, This is why you don't divide a palace equally every generation. You're not a good idea.

Simone Collins: No. But it

Malcolm Collins: also causes you to [00:19:00] not have as much motivation to build this sort of intergenerational wealth. And it means you're structuring your business dealings in a way where that's less likely to become an outcome.

But it gets worse than that in terms of dealing with non Muslims, but we'll get to that in a second. Now we're going to go to the To the thing that everybody knows about the struggles that Muslims have was doing business. Do you know what this is? What is the worst of the prohibition? Loans, et cetera.

Yeah. Yeah. Usury laws. And the interesting thing is, is that Christians of the middle ages had the same usury laws that Muslims had. Are you, you're familiar with this, right? Like the Christians actually couldn't do debt either.

Simone Collins: I actually didn't know this. For how long was this the case? It was at the Catholic church.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it might've been a Catholic thing. And then

Simone Collins: they changed their policy at one of those big meetings.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or something like that. It loosened over time. But the point being is it's one of the ways that early Jewish culture got a lot of wealth because they didn't have the same usury restrictions as Christian culture.[00:20:00]

And debt is actually like really important to the functioning of a society. And, but it's important for all sorts of reasons you may not be thinking of. So, the, and I will note that the Muslim, like even during the Ottoman period, they had ways around these usury laws. Okay. Okay. So they would say, oh I will sell you the sheet for 100 now, but here's a contract where I have to buy it back from you for 150 later.

But all of these workarounds meant that the rate on debt. in the Ottoman Empire was 20 percent and it was 5 percent in the French Empire. Oh boy. If every one of your cultural group is just getting astronomically worse, 4x worse debt rates, you're going to do so, so, so much worse. And it gets worse than that.

When Europe developed one of the most ingenious financial instruments in history. human history which was bills of exchange, basically one bills that allowed you to basically carry cash between [00:21:00] settlements. And, and it allowed for interest. I'll read a definition of bills of exchange, a bill of exchange, the financial instrument that was widely used in medieval and early Europe to facilitate long distance trade and credit transactions.

It essentially functioned as a written order from one party, the drawer instructing another party, the drawee. To pay a specified sum of money to a third party, the payee at a future date. So it allowed for early forms of currency, for example. So I could you know, leave a bunch of money with one Templar compound and they'd give me a note that any other Templar compound would know meant I had my money was the first Templar compound.

And I might even be able to earn interest on that money. And then I could trade these. Note that only I could use a bandit who killed me couldn't use for things in other areas. And this is the first

Simone Collins: travelers checks, essentially.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, it mattered a lot in a period where, you know, otherwise you're going through bandit ridden [00:22:00] areas was like carts full of gold or other, you know, expensive.

Yeah, no,

Simone Collins: it was, that's a no go. That's a no

Malcolm Collins: go. Yeah. It gives them a reason to keep you for ransom rather than just take all the gold on your boat.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, the only way you could possibly travel with gold is if you had a whole retinue with you, and that cost a ton, so it just didn't, yeah, if you wanted to travel light, you had to do this.

Malcolm Collins: Now, this is not to say that Muslims didn't have some instruments to try to get around this, and these instruments were, and this is something you're going to see throughout this, They were developed well before the medieval Europeans developed these systems, but they were less sophisticated. So essentially the problem you're going to see over and over again is Muslims failed because they were dealing with more advanced systems that they were afraid to change.

It was not in spite of their previous [00:23:00] wealth and technological prowess that they failed. It was because of their wealth and previous technological prowess. So is this

Simone Collins: similar to the issue that you see with rapidly developing countries and countries that already developed where when countries are building major infrastructure using modern technology, it's just so much better versus the old nations that are stuck with the old infrastructure just sucks.

Is, is that kind of what we're looking at here?

Malcolm Collins: Sort of, yeah, that's, that's kind of it. And we'll probably do an episode on this phenomenon later. So I'll go over some of the Muslim structures because I actually think they're pretty interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Not heard of these before.

Malcolm Collins: And I am going to mispronounce everything.

A Mubarra was a type of Islamic partnership widely used for trade and commerce. Key features of a Mubarra include, one party, Arab Amal, provides capital, while the other, a Murabiria, provides labor and experience. So basically one person, the investor, gives capital, and the other, the [00:24:00] investee, gives labor and experience.

Profits are shared according to a pre agreed ratio. Losses are borne solely by the capital provider, unless caused by the mirabilary's negligence or misconduct. It sounds a lot like a startup, doesn't it? It does. It,

Simone Collins: it does. And I just When you butcher a word in a foreign language, it's like when Gomez speaks Italian to Morticia.

I just, you kill me. I love it.

Malcolm Collins: Don't stop. Or when Morticia. No, really? Yeah. Well, we'll see. I'll add, I'll add a scene and the audience can decide.

Tish. That's French. Gomez.

Malcolm Collins: Cause he

Simone Collins: keeps saying Cara Mia.

Malcolm Collins: That's no, I guess. Yeah. He says that. And then anyway, whatever. So, it was used for both short term trade expeditions and [00:25:00] long term business ventures.

So it could be used for trade expeditions, which are really important in the Muslim empire because they have a much more advanced trade network than the Europeans did with the Silk Road being a largely Muslim thing. So next reason. So it already is looking pretty bad for the Muslim empire, but it's just going to keep getting worse. Legal and business practices in the Islamic world discouraged foreign investment in partnerships. Now this isn't because they were explicitly discouraged by the Koran or anything, but But remember how I talked about all those really specific and technical and strict rules around inheritance in the Quran?

Well, they apply when you're working with a non Muslim. This is why here of large Muslim non Muslim partnerships in a historic context. If I form a business partnership with a you know, a strict Muslim in a historic context, again, The, the religious structures for getting around this have become significantly more advanced in modern times.

This isn't the same problem it was historically. [00:26:00] But, in a historic context, I'd have to dissolve it if my partner died. So like, why would I work with them? But it's worse than that. There are other reasons why you wouldn't work with them. Specifically Ottoman judges rarely accepted written contracts as evidence, relying instead on oral testimony.

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Oh, so this is just one of those things where like those nations that you could never invest in a company because you're just so afraid that that nation is going to first say, oh, yeah, come on in to my great country and 3 years later, they're like, by the way, that's my business now. Thank you. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: no, I say it still works that way in most Muslim majority countries because that would be a very offensive thing to say.

So you, you're certainly not saying it then tried to do business in some of these countries and lost a lot of money even though the companies did quite well. Oh. But as a, as a note here that, that in, in Istanbul, in the 18th century, [00:27:00] only. 3 percent of cases where a contract was brought to the judge, was it considered valid evidence?

So what did judges use instead of contracts because they didn't value written stuff? And this is a Muslim cultural thing. They really valued like in person face to face business deals. Oh, this is my worst

Simone Collins: nightmare.

Malcolm Collins: Networks of trust, right? Well, okay, here's the problem. If I am a Muslim judge in a Muslim empire and two people have a disagreement and I'm relying on oral testimony, which oral testimony am I going to value more highly?

It's going to be the Muslim oral testimony. Yeah. Great. So you must be sitting here thinking, ha ha ha. So the Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, they must have been sitting pretty. It's like Actually not. Nobody wanted to do business with them because of this. This is why corruption is bad. So religious minorities ended up making all the money in the Ottoman Empire.

While [00:28:00] Muslims made up 45 percent of the Ottoman Empire's population, exports and imports, they only made up 10. 3%. Man, exports and imports were what was it? 89. 7 percent owned by religious minorities. Oh

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: So that's, yeah, that's why you don't want to have, like, everybody always thinks like corrupt systems are going to help you, but they really don't.

They help you in the short term, but they hurt you in the longterm.

Speaker 4: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And, and that's why trust is so useful if you're trying to build big businesses.

Simone Collins: Well, or a good culture. If you want to build a culture. That thrives. You should build a culture that people consistently feel like they can trust and want to work with.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's almost like they were shooting themselves in their foot. Was this stuff? We'll get into this more in a second, but I mean,

Simone Collins: someone has to think through this a little bit and think.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, hold it. It gets worse. They also banned printing presses, which we'll get to in a bit, Mr. Why, and all the culture on this, but they only banned them for the Arabic language.[00:29:00]

Christians could still have printing presses, just the Muslims couldn't have printing. Is this like something like about sacredness or what? What was the reasoning? We'll get to it in a second why it was the case, but the point being, it's just like, okay, so now nobody trusts your people. And everyone else is super educated.

And your people are like legally not allowed to become educated. Like this seems like a bad system.

Simone Collins: They just, well, it seems so antithetical, at least to my mind. Priors on the height of the Muslim empire with this just education blossoming and intellectualism and

Malcolm Collins: It did for a period it was the highest Well, also a lot of these things were just like royals not thinking through things So the ottoman empire at its height made up 60 percent of the world's muslim population it really was like the focus of it.

And so when you think ottomans you think janissaries, right? You guys know the Janissaries,

Simone Collins: I wait, I don't know the Janissaries. I've never heard of the Janissaries.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, this requires some [00:30:00] education because to understand the stupidity of this entire situation, you need to understand the Janissaries.

Okay. The Ottomans came up with this brilliant system when they would conquer an enemy who was not Muslim usually Christian groups.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): I will add corrections as I go through this, because all this has done for memory, but the answer is always Christian groups in, most of them came from the Balkans.

Malcolm Collins: They would take their children, well not all of them, but like one in ten or something like that, they had different systems, but yeah.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: It was actually done through a tax on the slaves that the military was taking in.

Malcolm Collins: And you had to offer them up as tribute to the, the Ottomans and then the Ottomans would take these young boys who were born into Christian families, and they would train them to be their elite soldiers from birth.

And this was actually pretty effective in the short term because it meant that, you know, when the Janissaries would go in, there were crack troops with advanced gunpowder weaponry. The Ottomans were the first people to go into gunpowder [00:31:00] weaponry, talking about being ahead of like technology.

Simone Collins: I thought Chinese.

Are you sure it's not the Chinese?

Malcolm Collins: I'm talking about in the West.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: Keep in mind the Ottomans had the trade networks coming to China before they could get to Europe. They're like, oh, new technology. Let's, let's arm our guys with this and not let this go any further. Anyway, So Janissaries, elite gun troops, very early, very powerful if you were, like, one of these Christian settlements, you would have some hesitancy about firing back, because this could be your brother, this could be your son, yeah, absolutely, your son, you're, you know, so, so very powerful, but these people, people were, you know, ra in the courts.

And I brainwashed, not really b were just raised in a dif the time they could remem they weren't raised like. Is they weren't raised like bad. Okay. Yeah. They were castrated. Oh, you didn't mention that. Come on. That's frustrated. I have to remember this, but I mean, I'll cut this out if I'm wrong about it.

[00:32:00] But it doesn't

Simone Collins: seem, it doesn't seem likely that they would castrate elite warriors cause you need the testosterone to kick ass.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: To show you how bad Google's gotten him about doing a quick Google search to see if the Janissaries were castrated. And Google says, yes, they were castrated when I did the search.

However, after recording this, I decided to go back and double check this in. No, they were not castrated. This is a common myth. Conception. Because while many of the members of the court were castrated, the Janissaries were not specifically the members of the court that were most likely to be castrated.

We're the sons of Muslim.

Dignitaries in slaves who were brought in primarily from Africa. So, yeah. , where did I did get wrong? And what I do remember is that the Janissaries originally weren't allowed to have families.

But by the 18th century, it had become normalized for the Janissaries to have family. And actually by like 1820s, they ended up having to be formerly disbanded because they had become so powerful.

Simone Collins: You definitely need the testosterone to kick ass.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, some Janissaries [00:33:00] were castrated but if I remember correctly, after the Janissaries gained power, SPOILER ALERT they they stopped castrating them.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: What I had. Misremembered here is that after they gained power, they gained the right to have wives and children.

Not that they stopped being castrated.

Malcolm Collins: So First

Simone Collins: order of business, please stop gutting up our dicks.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so, so, here's what happened, okay? So, the Janissaries were not treated poorly.

It was actually kind of an ethical system in a way. So, yeah, they take your kid, but that kid would get to live in the castle. Like, like they lived around like the, the, the, you can go, if you tour the Ottoman castles, you can tour where the Janissaries lived,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I should do it dinner. All Janissaries lived in the court complex. , the majority actually lived at specialized Janissary training areas.

, but some lived in the court complex and that is relevant for the rest of the story.

Malcolm Collins: they were basically like court officials kind of, and they were pretty high status court officials within like the larger Ottoman court [00:34:00] system because they were a full time military and keep in mind full time militaries were not common back then to have standing military.

So that was also pretty advanced. Yeah. And, and they lived at the court and they gained a lot of power. Well, the problem is, is they kept gaining more and more and more power. Kind of like the Praetorian guard was in Rome. If you want to know a bag of dicks, look up the history of the Praetorian guard.

And I might do something on that. Well, that was the, the elite guard that was supposed to guard you know, the Caesar. And it turns out that that being that elite guard gives you increasingly more like you go 200, 300 years you begin to get more and more and

more favors for your group because you're this you know, intergenerational.

Speaker 10: However, the time had finally come, the time for a new age, the time for revenge. And so, Constantine proclaimed that the Praetorian Guard would [00:35:00] be

Speaker 11: abolished!

Malcolm Collins: So, there's a group of former Christians that they brought in basically ended up running the show was in a few hundred years and gain more and more power was in castle politics till they were basically running everything.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: Until they were disbanded by Ottoman Sultan Muhammad. The second Essentially.

The Ottoman [00:36:00] sultans took a bunch of Christian Young boys. In turned the Ottoman courts into a, uh, this situation right here.

Malcolm Collins: And it might also show why they didn't. Care as much that the muslim subpopulations were getting sort of stomped on because they didn't have any ethnic allegiance to them.

They were just like are you following the rules? Okay, I don't care Well, if they're doing

Simone Collins: their job and it sounds like they were

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were doing their job. The janissaries were quite good at a lot of what they did They were not as bad as the praetorians. Now we are going to go to the next point and this is going to remind you a lot of modern times simone Okay The alliance between the religious and political authorities hindered progress and increased the size of the bureaucracy.

So I will put a graph on screen here that will show the number of trades by sector by date. And the orange is the earlier, the first half of the Ottoman empire, and the blue is the second half. And this was actually taken from the visual [00:37:00] politic video on this. And you can see an explosion in the amount of bureaucratic and military spending.

Okay. Where it used to be the minority. It used to be that most of the spending was on commerce and industry. But it exploded to like eight X what it was in the first half of the empire. And then you also had an explosion on. Education and clericacy and religious spending specifically in the early Islamic Empire, the Alma, which were basically the knowledge workers, the religious elites that would handle like court cases and stuff like that.

Well, the system really worked when they were mostly religious officials. When they began to get closer to the entrenched power structures and realized they could reinforce those power structures, essentially, the size of the bureaucracy kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This is very similar to one of those modern graphs where I put on screen here about, like, how our education system, we keep putting more money into it, but the money just keeps going more and more and more to the administration, and none of it is going to the teachers or the students or anything like that because bureaucracy is very good at self [00:38:00] replicating if you don't come through clean house, burn it with fire.

Malcolm Collins: That is the way bureaucracies need to be treated.

Now, you also had another problem happening here, which is in all, so far, we've only been talking about the more minor problems. We're going to get to the big, big, big, big issue in just a second here. But due to a series of crop failures that happened during this period, people begin to move to something called ICTAs which were local fiefdoms, which made them sort of like, They were regressing to a more feudal state from what was a more urban state.

Muslims were much more of an urban people than the Europeans in this early period. It is part of why they developed all these prohibitions around dogs, because generally only urban cultural groups develop prohibitions around dogs. Dogs. We have a video on that. It's why did Jews own, not own guns where we talk about this?

Cause Jews are another mostly urban population and that have been urban for centuries [00:39:00] and that also have prohibitions against dogs. But they moved them to be more rural and into these fiefdoms. And as these fiefdoms begin to develop, they begin to divide the power of the Ottoman empire. But the Ottoman kingship was able to maintain authority, like not have to worry about being overthrown by marrying into them.

And sort of supporting their power, which prevented the country from economically developing, which sort of froze it in a futile state.

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now here's the big one. The Ottomans had a prohibition against the printing press for around 200 years, though I need to make some notes here. It was only for the Muslim.

Talk about like shooting yourself in the foot. It was only for Arabic. So if you're a Muslim and you knew other languages, you were okay. But like a lot of Muslims didn't know other languages in here. I will put a graph here showing literacy rates where you can see that Turkey's literacy rate in the 1960s was [00:40:00] comparable to 15th century.

Netherlands. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was bad. But the thing is, is they weren't entirely stupid to ban it.

Simone Collins: Okay. Why? There's

Malcolm Collins: two reasons why they banned it. One is more stupid than the other, but it wasn't wrong exactly. So the first is that there was this giant A sort of union or, or, or guild of calligraphers.

Simone Collins: Oh, they were trying to prop up the calligraphy industry. Big calligraphy, shut down printing presses,

Malcolm Collins: calligraphy living in the United States. Have you ever traveled in a Muslim country?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, actually, okay, you haven't. I should send you to one. I've been to lots of Muslim majority countries. And if you've been to a Muslim majority country, you're like, Oh, I can see why big calligraphy would have a lot of power.

Every mosque is decorated because they have prohibitions against idolatry that are often much harsher. Christian or Jewish prohibitions against idolatry. [00:41:00] And so what they use to decorate everything is the Quranic words and verse.

Simone Collins: And it's gorgeous. I mean, from what I've seen in museums and whatnot, absolutely stunning.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I would argue this is still a form of idolatry, but whatever. Point being, They didn't see it that way. They saw it as like their core. Or look at the old Testament.

Simone Collins: Okay. Humans have a long track record of just, Oh, that golden calf is so cool.

Malcolm Collins: And just, yeah, they got to start putting gold in the letters, you know?

But, but yes, so they did lots and lots and lots of calligraphy. It was sort of their main form of artwork. You could almost say their main form of cultural expression. And so I don't feel like the printing

Simone Collins: press wouldn't have me as a an official or a king or a policymaker of that time concerned because there are still, it's not like the printing press is going to change mosque decoration.

Malcolm Collins: They weren't just involved in that form of calligraphy. Keep in mind, the Islamic empire also had, because they had been the world's knowledge [00:42:00] center for so long, The largest libraries, you know, when we, everyone says when the Ottoman empire was sacked by the Mongols, which was another big thing here, they don't say the rivers ran red.

They ran black with the ink of books. That is how valuable the libraries were, how vast the libraries were in the Islamic empires. They had entire villages of calligraphers that were attached. To the palace complexes, to be writing the laws, to be writing all the books, to be doing all that. They were seen as associated with knowledge, and they were not wrong.

In fact, think about these, you'll see where a lot of modern analogies are about to come into this, or a lot of modern comparisons. The second thing they fear was that if The printing press [00:43:00] wrote the Qur'an down and made it easy to access, and just anyone could read it. I mean, what if people started to have disagreements?

That could lead to war, a century of strife. And people laugh and they're like, oh, so silly. That didn't happen in Europe when the printing press was invented. And then they're like, oh, wait, no, that's exactly what happened in Europe when the printing press was invented. Regular citizens picked up a copy of the Bible, started reading it, and they turned to the Catholic Church and was like, hey, wait a f ing second.

This doesn't say what you said it said. This is something entirely different. And, and there's, there's different ways this could be interpreted. And then they went to war over it. And that's a little thing that we call the Reformation. And then all of the wars that came out of the Reformation. So they were not wrong about this.

And I would contrast all of these fears with the [00:44:00] fears that people have today about a I. It's a new technology. So who who complains about it? If the A. I. Is is allowed. It's gonna take the jobs of our knowledge workers.

Speaker 4: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it could cause strife. And the other thing that they argued, and they literally argued this is we just don't know what the long term effects of this technology are gonna be.

It's safer to just