Why Did Muslims Go from Debauched to Prude? (The Islamic World is Post-Apocalyptic)

In this eye-opening episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into why much of the modern Islamic world feels "post-apocalyptic" — crumbling ancient grandeur, neglected heritage, and a society living in the ruins of its own past glory. They contrast today's strict moral codes (influenced heavily by 18th-century Wahhabism and Saudi oil wealth) with the wild hedonism of Islam's historical peak: lavish palaces, opium-fueled feasts, widespread homosexuality (including pederasty), endless harems, cross-dressing trends started by desperate royal mothers, and poetry celebrating wine and young boys.

From Moroccan citadels split and looted across generations to Ottoman sultans with 300+ concubines and nudity in palaces shocking 19th-century Europeans, they unpack how Islam flipped from one of the most "debauched" civilizations to one of the strictest. They also touch on "dead" vs. "living" religious traditions, the closure of ijtihad, cousin marriage debates, why Islam excelled as a ruling-minority faith but struggles as a mass religion, and light-hearted parenting tangents (helicopter-obsessed kids and Bosnian songs).

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: .[00:00:00]

Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about a concept that came up in our episode on why Muslims almost never win wars of aggression

after, like, within two generations of Mohammad’s life. And, in that episode, I commented that Muslim society had become post-apocalyptic in nature.

And I wanna talk about this

in this episode, we’re going to both talk about this concept of Islam as a post-apocalyptic society, and also discuss how they went from being seen as one of the most debauched societies on earth, , with the jabba the hut like scenes or belly dancers and dripping in jewels to one of the most strict, .

Parts of the world morally. You know, throwing gay people off rooftops, , women covered 100%, not even, , able to, in some Islamic countries, have both of their eyes unveiled at the same time while still [00:01:00] staying countries with high amounts of gay sex. Although that’s something we’ll go into in a, in a future episode, , in Islamic countries, they’re often like, oh, don’t.

Don’t, it’s not get, it’s with a child. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. And it’s like, well, that you see, that might make it worse in some other cultural context.

Because like you see when I talk to you and I’m like, what, what, what, what, what are you doing having sex with that little boy? , And you’re like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s chill. He’s a child. Um, I was actually, that was the thing I was worried about was, was not the gay part, but the child part. Um, so you see, see from my cultural context, But anyway, back to the Islamic world, living in a post apocalypse.

Malcolm Collins: because I think that we really do not understand how directly this is true. If you, a listener has traveled many parts of the Islamic world. We, we’ve traveled pretty extensively in the Islamic world. You will notice when I say [00:02:00] it is post-apocalyptic. I don’t just mean like the Muslim people at one point in the distant past you know, had greatness and they don’t have greatness now.

I mean that you see it all around you. It almost feels like in those movies about Apocalypses where you have people camping out in like a falling apart New York City or something like that. Yeah, you don’t

Simone Collins: have to imagine that if you go to like Morocco because you can just do it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I’ll, I’ll give an example of this and I thought it was one of the most shocking to me.

It was when we were in Morocco and we went not far out of Morocco to, I pulled up the name of the place you found it, Bedo.

And oh, I love it when

Simone Collins: you butcher foreign languages. Oh, it’s so hot.

Malcolm Collins: Citadel in, in Southern Morocco. And it’s, it’s giant. It’s this giant complex. But. [00:03:00] If you walk through it, and it’s almost like a palace it was once owned by the one of the descendants of the prophet Mohammed, and it’s just, I’ll obviously put pictures on screen here of it.

Simone Collins: Do you want me to send you the ones that we, we took

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. You can find them. Yeah, I’ll absolutely about it. Is that it? As you walk through it, some sections of it look almost perfectly maintained. And some sections of it have just completely collapsed to almost nothing but rubble. And there’s of things in all states in between.

And the reason is, is because as the family went on, they would split ownership of it with every generation. And some descendants looted their parts of the castle for anything they could sell. Other descendants tried to maintain it and use it as like makeshift restaurants and stuff like that. But it is.

Very much like a, a hermit crab in the shell of a castle, and you don’t need to be outside. One of the craziest things about a place like Morocco’s, a particularly good example [00:04:00] of this is that you climb to the top of one of the roofs there and you will see like there could be buildings that people just forgot about that have been built around by other buildings.

The, in the way the city is built up. And I suspect Rome was probably like this at one point too. Mm-hmm. Just like without any long-term infrastructure planning or anything like that. And many of the buildings are obviously absolutely ancient. And I say this, you know, as somebody who’s living in a house from the 17 hundreds, these, just everything. There was old. And the other interesting thing about the Islamic world is if you go through old Catholic cities you will often see old, beautiful architecture, but it is maintained yeah, yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, very common in Europe, you know, things are carefully updated.

Malcolm Collins: No. In the Protestant world, you typically get something different.

I’ll talk about that in a second. Oh, okay. Interesting. So in the, in, in the Catholic world it’s, it’s very common to walk by, very well [00:05:00] maintained ancient glor structures. Even if, even if their own civilization is like poor and impoverished and, and corrupt they do have a reverence for things of the past.

If you go through a lot of, you know, whether it’s Iran or Egypt or, you know, Morocco you go through these places, you will see often old, beautiful structures sort of falling apart like dilapidated, I guess I’d say. But, but weirdly still in use. It’s not like they’re dilapidated because they’re misused.

What happens in the Protestant world was most of the, the ch the old like glor, like giant cathedrals and stuff like that were torn down or torn apart. So it’s very, yeah, there’s still

Simone Collins: architecturally sound. I, I’m going through and looking at pictures of this one complex we visited that one of the descendants was still living in, and we, we walked through his part of it and it’s, it’s crumbly, but like in the parts that he lives in.

And you’ll see this and Malcolm will send you the photos on WhatsApp. He just gonna put [00:06:00] carpets on the ground. And you can, you can kind of see furniture around and like there are just parts of the place that are, that look genuinely like ruins and there are just holes and you can see where

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like you’ll falling apart.

Reach the edge of one of his like second story hallways, uhhuh. And it is a, a, a, a hole to, to nothing because the, the person who maintained the part that connected to that fell apart. Yeah. They’re just like,

Simone Collins: I’m not gonna bother to keep this up. Well, or they didn’t have the money for it, you know, whatever or something.

And it’s not like this doesn’t happen in all parts of the world. I mean, you can buy castles in Europe. For basically nothing because no one can afford to keep them up. And that’s not right. But

Malcolm Collins: this is very different. You don’t have major architectural monuments in the center of major European cities that are basically falling apart.

That is very common in parts of the muscle world. Mm-hmm.

And what I wanted to talk to about this as I wanted to contrast this current state of the Muslim world with the true hedonism and debauchery of Islam at its height. Mm-hmm. Because I think that when people [00:07:00] look at how strict the modern Muslim world is.

They think of this as from Muhammad till today, that’s how Islam was. And they have broad images of like exotic belly dancers, maybe giant. Didn’t that have something to do with aladin? It’s like aladin something, something. Yeah. That, that was actually the core of Muslim civilization. That extreme level of hedonism really for longer than the extremely strict interpretation of Islam that we have today.

Simone Collins: Wasn’t it very selective hedonism though? Like you could be hedonistic if you could pay for it, and everyone else was held to very strict standards and especially women were held to very strict standards. So basically only if you were a wealthy man would you be. Subject to this and everyone else kind of, I, I, well, similar to how I would imagine it in ancient Greece, for example, there was hedonism in ancient Rome if you were [00:08:00] wealthy and not a slave and not a woman.

But aside from that, most people live pretty austerely.

Malcolm Collins: So actually not exactly. Okay. So you’ve gotta keep in mind how many of these Islamic societies were structured. Okay. First of all, at, at many of their heights, they were not majority Arab or majority Muslim. Oh. They just made up the ruling class.

So their lifestyle was funded by taxing Jewish and Christian local populations. Oh. Huh. So, so they didn’t need everyone to be able to afford this level of hedonism. The second thing is that they had like lots of slaves like slavery and, and slave like conditions were very common in the Islamic Empire.

And so, the people. Who frequently were not living these e extremely hedonistic lives. Were living the lives of slaves or slave like people. Yeah. And like you did have a middle class, the, the percentage,

Simone Collins: was there a middle class like, actually, because I think the, this continent is a middle class is [00:09:00] pretty new.

I mean, for the vast majority of human history, you were either a surf slash slave slash peasant slash subsistence survivor, or you were one of the very, very, very few people who owned land Well, well, typically if

Malcolm Collins: you’re talking about middle class in a historic context, you’re typically talking about the merchant class.

And again yeah, the merchant class

Simone Collins: also was, I mean, that, that was a new thing starting, what are we gonna say? Early renaissance. There wasn’t really a merchant class. So much agent did

Malcolm Collins: have Islamic merchant classes. They were even quite famous for it. Right. The, the, the silk Road trader, right.

With even a stereo. Oh,

Simone Collins: oh yeah. Fair point. Fair point. Yes, you’re right. So they did, oh wait, the Silk Road, the Silk Road did not emerge until. After the Renaissance, when did the Silk Road emerge?

Malcolm Collins: The Silk Road was an important, not, not necessarily in the Silk Road structure, but it was largely what kept the Islamic Empire wealthy.

Because and, and, [00:10:00] okay, so

Simone Collins: it’s been around forever, like 100 to 1, 130 to one 14 BCE. So I’m totally off there.

Malcolm Collins: Islam got poor. And one of the things, I didn’t go as deeply in on that episode, but was a big thing is that whenever you were trading for spy spices or goods mm-hmm. That came from India or China or anywhere that part of the world, and you were in Europe mm-hmm.

Your traders until they got the the, the, the pass going really well through the canal. What, I forget what it’s called the Dead Sea. No, no, not the Dead Sea. What’s it called? The, the Red Sea. The Red Sea passage going you’d have to go through, the, the Muslim territories. And so they’d add these enormous taxes ‘cause they could just put whatever taxes they want on stuff.

Sure. And it was like a free money machine for anyone who was in, I mean, talk about getting lucky twice that and then oil. That’s a really

Simone Collins: good point. Wow. Lucky ducks. Although maybe not right, because I, I think we, there’s a general pattern in history, climatically and otherwise like with, with just random lux scenarios in terms of trade here [00:11:00] too, whereby, whoa.

Okay. When you have it too easy, it, it breeds weakness essentially. Like you’re not getting the sufficient forcing function societally, or even just genetically to be stronger and smarter and better. And therefore you suffer in the long term. Kind of like if you’re not forced to get up and exercise every day, you know, you’re more likely to become obese and unhealthy.

So it’s better to be in a situation where you’re forced to do that, even if it’s unpleasant.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, I agree with that. I agree. It, it definitely, I do not think worked out Civilizationally in their favor in the long run. Another thing to, to keep in mind, or interesting point here is if you’re wondering, well, when did Islam become incredibly strict before we go into all the, the ex excesses of Islam in the past?

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, but because also I, I just thought in general that Islamic law has been, it’s not a new thing. And that it has always been pretty strict, but maybe I’m wrong here. This is super, so

Malcolm Collins: a, a huge part of the strict in, strict of, of [00:12:00] Islam. Mm-hmm. I’d say probably 50%. Now, it wasn’t the only factor.

We’ll talk about some other factors, probably 50% was the spread of Wahhabism by the Saudi royal family. So super

Simone Collins: recent

Malcolm Collins: in Wahhabism. Yeah. Wasn’t even founded until the 18th century. Holy moly. And for people who aren’t familiar Wahhabism. Is a, a very, very strict form of Sunni Islam. And the Saudi Royal family basically partnered with to gain legitimacy.

Sorry, what is it now? The Saudi Royal family, the House of Saad. Mm-hmm. Partnered with the hoist sort of school of of theology and theologians and we’re like, you back us, we back you. That’s the, that’s the core agreement that made Saudi Arabia work and a legitimate state in the eyes of the other Muslims of that territory.

‘cause they’ve expanded a lot through military conquest.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And then they have since then been, pushing wa, I mean, they spend billions of dollars a year attempting to push the [00:13:00] growth of this wahabi school in other parts of the Muslim world. Mm-hmm. And then this leads to sort of a perception among, because if you are you know, a, a, a wealthy sod, right?

Are, you are a wealthy, you know, in any of any of these Muslim countries, you’re in this sort of dominance hierarchy with the other wealthy people in the other Muslim countries, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you, you are ever aware of this, both your position within the dominance hierarchy of your own country and, and it, and much more so than like America, right?

Like in America, I, I do not think the wealthy families are quite as obsessed with their relative status and perception to other wealthy families. They’re more interested in like, getting stuff done or what, like the average person thinks of them. Yeah, yeah. Or yeah,

Simone Collins: more if we’re talking about what.

Reine Lin was that his name really popularized with this, this concept of American status signaling. It really was more of a broadcast. You want everyone to know you’re rich. You’re not trying to, it’s not a mean girl style [00:14:00] situation where you’re trying to convince certain people that you’re awesome.

Yeah. Everyone.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, you do no, you do do that to an extent with Americans. I mean, that’s why rich people wear like unbranded clothes and stuff like that, that only other rich people know about. Right? Yeah. You know, there, there is an extent to that, but it’s not that, it’s not the same as like a list of known aristocratic players.

Mm-hmm. And, and, and part of this status hierarchy became how you related to Islam with the dominance and, and, and rising. Of some extremely conservative Muslim families that basically got rich randomly through oil money. So typically people who are extremely religious do not get rich and powerful because they’re too busy

Simone Collins: being devoted to God.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not just you’re busy being devoted, it’s that being extremely religious adds a bunch of externalities to your ability to accumulate wealth. Mm-hmm. My family has always been pretty religious. And whenever they’ve gotten, and they’ve gotten super rich in number of [00:15:00] times they ended up donating most of their money to church or to charity.

Mm-hmm. Like, and that’s just what you have to do. If you have like a, if you’re not Hassan and it’s not all a, a fake thing, you know, and you like actually care about. Downtrodden. That’s just a thing you do. But the, the, in, in Islam and in in Islam, you’re supposed to do that. They just got so rich that they were able to both do that and maintain their wealth, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And so this happened in a number of places, whether it’s through, you know, the Gas and Qatar or the, the Saudis sitting on oil or the UAE and the number of interesting economic plays that they were able to pull off that required a lot more intelligence than the other players.

But the UA empire is crumbling right now, but that’s a, a whole other episode. Basically a bunch of diplomatic plays they made, and like Yemen and stuff like that are super backfired. And they may even face problems in international courts finally for it. But anyway so, so, because a bunch of random, like imagine in Texas, you, you, you had something similar to this sort of a bunch [00:16:00] of random religious evangelical Christians end up.

Sitting on oil money. And now being an evangelical Christian is cool and high class in Texas. Mm-hmm. As it was when I was growing up. Yeah. So, which is, which is usually not the case. Right. And so that’s the other thing that, that caused this sort of flip, but the flip in part happened because of the oil money itself.

Mm. Then there’s the other thing that caused the flip. I, I guess I’m just gonna go totally into all of this. Okay. Please. Which is called the closure of the gates of Iita.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it’s a, it, it is a famous but highly debated concept in Islamic illegal and intellectual history. Mm-hmm. Refer the idea that at some point the practice of ija, the independent reasoned effort to quantify scholars muji to derive new legal rulings from the Koran Sunna prophets teachings.

Consensus Jha and analogies haws effectively closed or became severely restricted after this supposed dis closure. Later, scholars were expected to follow established [00:17:00] precedents through akil imitation or adherence to one of the four main Sunni schools of law, HANA Malaki Shafi. And okay. Do you want me to dive deeper into this concept, or do you find this less interesting?

Simone Collins: There are so many elements of this that I don’t understand. I, I lack the foundational context to find this interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it is, it is interesting. It’s, it’s actually, I’m sure

Simone Collins: it is. I just don’t know like half these words. So I more than half, I don’t know 90% of these words, so it doesn’t mean anything to me.

I’ll explain

Malcolm Collins: it differently. If you, you’re just saying

Simone Collins: like a durka, durka,

Malcolm Collins: durka, durka, moham ji. It’s bad. It’s true.

Speaker: Dirk, Dirk, Allah,

Muhammad Jihad.

Oha Durka,

Malcolm Collins: so, so, basically. If you go to our [00:18:00] track series, if you remember Simone, I talk about the concept of a living versus a dead religious tradition. Yes. And I argue that a living religious tradition is a religious tradition where the rules, structure and interpretation of that religious system or metaphysical system is still an ongoing, an active debate.

And not just like an active debate, but it’s often a conversation. It’s part of religious practice to have these conversations. Mm-hmm. And then in other religions that does not happen. And you’ll get religions that are on various parts of the spectrum. So Islam is one of the deadest of dead religions.

You simply cannot easily add new concepts to Islam anymore. Mm-hmm. And that’s one of, and you used to be able to, that used to be a core part of practicing Islam, but it just

Simone Collins: lacks the, the religious infrastructure for that I, in the way that the Catholic church doesn’t, ‘cause you have a very functional, active No, the vascular

Malcolm Collins: church is a pretty dead religious system as well.

We’ll, we’ll get to [00:19:00] that in a second as well. Well, okay. At least the LDS

Simone Collins: church has a, a fairly dynamic system.

Malcolm Collins: LDS is a weird kind of dead, which we’ll get to.

Simone Collins: Okay, well then what, what, what is alive then?

Malcolm Collins: Evangel, evangelical Christians are pretty alive. If you, no, if you, if you, they’re not, they’re

Simone Collins: not exactly centrally governed.

I mean, how are, how are they really alive? That’s part of the problem

Malcolm Collins: with living versus dead religious systems. So, I guess I can use Judaism as a good sort of counterweight here to, to study. Okay. Yeah. Judaism, right. There was this system, and this is why if you read like medieval Jewish theologians, they’re really all about like Muslim, medieval theologians and vice versa.

These two groups really liked each other. And this was because during this period they were both very living traditions. Like a a, a new Jewish theologian would like have some idea and have a debate and write it down. And that sort of stuff is still like required reading, like anyone who’s serious about studying Jewish theology today.

Right. You know? [00:20:00] And within Judaism you had this system and it sort of worked this way in Islam too in the early days where you’d sort of, you could sort of challenge things that happened one generation ago, but you can’t really challenge things that happened more than two generations ago. And so as time went on and, and Judaism is interesting because it is definitely harder today to introduce any sort of a new concept was in Judaism than it was historically.

Historically you could introduce pretty radical new ideas in Judaism but these radical reinterpretations happened. Up until fairly recently within Judaism probably the, the most famous recent one is the, the basham ta who founded what is today like the Hasidic School of Judaism and everything like that.

And people know I have a lot of differences with, with that school and, and that religious figure.

But he did radically reshape what Judaism is. And during his life, it was an active debate. Most of the rabbinic scholars during his life, like the, the vast [00:21:00] majority of rabbinic scholars during like the height of his activity during his life like hated him.

They, they thought he was like a demon. Like they were like, nobody talked to this guy. Nobody go near this guy. His ideas are crazy. Don’t, don’t interact with him. He is a, he is a, a. He is a scam artist. And despite that, his ideas ended up basically winning. And for a number of generations the descendants, I forget what they’re called, they’re called the, the Min Ji or something of the rabbinic scholars who were all against the Basov.

They, they persisted as a Jewish school and, and, and they still exist within, like Israel and stuff like that, but there’s just not like a on the rise or particularly relevant ideological faction within Judaism right now. And in Islam, this closed way earlier, I guess I’ll go to the other tradition so we can sort of talk about this Mormonism.

Was one of the, at its height, the most living of living religions. You know, this is the Orson Pratt period and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Where, you know, when you had all the colonists still coming over and stuff like that, the like, higher ups in the Mormon community would just like go out and spitball and you could like read the [00:22:00] writings and it’s crazy.

It’s like, Hey, how do you take like a soul works? And they’d be like, well, maybe it like splits into pieces and can become pure and maybe like when you die, your soul splits up and then gets like resorted into different people or maybe life. You need to like do it a certain number of times and they’d like, have like completely different medica physical frameworks, leaders in the community.

Orson perhaps is the best example of this, would just hypothesize about this stuff and they’d be like, main. Characters in, in the Mormon tradition. Right. And they, they wouldn’t even be like the sitting prophet. Right? Yeah. And then as time has gone on really the, the, the sitting prophet basically, if he’s going to make an update to Mormon theology these days he typically makes it with the council of like a few other people in the community.

It’s not like every Mormon meeting is like, Hey, let’s talk esoterica man. But there was a period in Mormon history where that was absolutely the case. So, so it’s, it’s, it’s weird and you can’t [00:23:00] easily do this as a Mormon either. Like, you can’t be like, Hey, I have a different theory about how this should be interpreted.

If it’s like radically different, people would be like, well, that’s against, you know, what’s the, what’s the main church says right now? Right? Catholicism, sort of the same way with Mormonism, you can do it more. But Catholicism, I. Is a living tradition, but in an incredibly structured format, right?

Like the living part of the tradition. If you wanna be part of the living Catholic tradition you have to become a priest or a nun.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Like if, if, if you or at least found one of the major orders or something like that, right? Like you, you have to be part of the bureaucracy and interacting with the bureaucracy.

And then that stuff gets passed up and you might be able to get into you know, one of those big councils that they hold or something like that. And then your ideas get put into Catholic, Catholic doctorate, right? Like, it, it can update but the updates become more obscure and bureaucratic.

Like if you look at the various I forget what they’re called, but when the, when the Catholics all get together to, to [00:24:00] say the stuff that’s supposed to be unchangeable and, and not go back on it. And once okay. Only have these conferences councils. Councils, okay. And if you look at the original ones, it’s like a bunch of actual theological questions.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: How should we conceive of Christ and stuff like this? Yeah. If you go later, it just gets more and more bureaucratic.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s bureaucrats arguing about bureaucratic structure and that’s, oh,

Simone Collins: but what about the, the wild swings in favor of various progressive causes and ideal that ideals that the Catholic Church has made?

Malcolm Collins: I don’t think that those things, I think that that is core to what has always been Catholicism has been one of the primary champions of stuff like socialism since the very first socialist movements. The idea that Catholicism was ever not, if you look at the United States, the Democratic Party was the Catholic party pretty much until this last election cycle.

Like if you look at JFK, who’s JFK? Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: The first. [00:25:00] Joe Biden. Yeah. And Biden. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Okay. So, so this idea

Malcolm Collins: that,

Simone Collins: well, yeah. I mean, and even now with JD Vance, he’s just being massively criticized by the current Pope. Also American. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But, but I mean, and, and think about the tra, I mean, Catholics are all about like, you know, taking in, you know, immigrants helping out the poor, everything.

Like, this is all, that’s all their bag, man. Like, I don’t understand when people were like you know, they haven’t folded on stuff like women priests and, and, and the gay stuff yet, like, they haven’t actually folded, they’re

Simone Collins: moving in that general direction. They, they

Malcolm Collins: have not folded on anything that’s in the Bible.

So they, they, they basically stayed, you know, I think the Catholic church like didn’t do some big veer in one direction or in another. They’re just being what they’ve always been. And I think it confuses people because they begin to think of the Catholic church as like not different from the Evangelical church, which is always a very conservative church.

A [00:26:00] conservative IE in world politics. But if, if you’re talking about the reason I call obviously Teop Puritan is, would be like the, the most extreme example of a living tradition in a modern sense, because it is just a radical discussion about ideology that is meant to change with every generation.

But when you close off interpretation of, of structures, all any generation can iteratively add is basically new rules on top of the preexisting structures. And this is where I think it causes a lot of problems for modern Judaism because they, they just have so many rules at this point, right?

Because you can, you cannot, like, wipe out a lot of the previous rules. And so it’s just iterative, iterative, iterative and eventually I think it breaks if, if you do not have the ability to audit, like the source code of your religious system.

Simone Collins: Sure, yeah. The code base becomes unmanageable. Yeah, but did, I can’t remember which Silicon Valley company had a code base.

Their like original code base was called The Beast, I think. And there was one person whose entire job [00:27:00] was just to keep it from breaking every day.

Malcolm Collins: I feel like this our fabs code base these days. Mm. God. I have to keep going back in fixing, Hey, it’s mostly working now. People playing it, enjoying it, which is cool.

But I’ll go into how, how decadent the Muslim world was at its height. Right. So, if we go for some, some poems this is the Kuat of Abu Noal. So some lines from it. His fine wine and his boy religion, no less than my cash

Simone Collins: fine Wines and a Young PO

What’s interesting is that the, one of these that Islam has given up more strictly is, uh, the fine wine and not so much the young boys. , If you go to many Islamic countries today, like Afghanistan, you will see higher rates of gay sex than you see in most countries. Um, but they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Don’t worry about it, bro. It’s, it’s, it’s okay. Um. It was a child and you’re like, how did [00:28:00] that makes it so much worse? But in the Islamic mind, that actually okays it in in many contexts. And we’ll get into why this is so common in Islamic countries to in, in, I’m gonna do some other episode on this because Yeah, like is Islam got like really strict on some areas, like no adult gay sex and no alcohol, but anything you do as children is fine.

Malcolm Collins: Wine Coursing Between the Water and the Force From the Hand of the Boy with the griddle on his slender waist, A straight well shaped lad girdle as a

Simone Collins: bridle.

Yeah, I’m picturing someone with some kind of like griddle setup where they’re like making pancakes like a cigarette, cigarette style, like, you know, waitress woman, but he’s just making pancakes instead of frying bacon. I would dig that. Well, they were really, boy come

Malcolm Collins: here, griddle boy empire as well. Okay.

Yeah, it, it’s probably the, like the gayest of the major empires to the extent where and I Rudyard goes into this and, you know, like he’s more than the [00:29:00] Romans

Simone Collins: though.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Way more than like Greeks, than the Romans. Really. Okay. So here, here’s an example. Well, well, I mean, we’ll get the Romans at their gayest are about as gay as the Muslims at their gayest.

Okay. Okay. But on average, the Muslims were gayer.

Simone Collins: Oh wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: The, the, the Romans at their gayest were extremely gay. They were

Simone Collins: so gay. They were so gay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We should probably do an episode on that like

Simone Collins: we did, but it was about like, does, does proliferation of. Gayness or broad acceptance of it.

Predict the downfall of civilizations. Remember?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What of my favorite? Like just this level of psychosis of some Roman emperors. I think that’s what would cut off their members and then like throw them in a room full of snakes. Another emperor used to love, I think, to just throw venomous snakes at the crowd when they’d like come to see him as a joke.

That’s, that’s fun.

Simone Collins: That, that’s pretty good. It’s, it’s the, the t-shirt cannon of his kind of, his time. But he said, this [00:30:00] time you die.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you gonna get through gold or snakes this time?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, you never know what you’re gonna, it’s, it’s the original trick or treat.

Malcolm Collins: So here I’m gonna draw from a, a key source is Alt Barris Tuckery Al Russo while Alka.

Yeah. Dka. History of the prophets and kings. Okay. Okay. So, the, he’s talking about the, the Altare explicitly says that all Ahman was inclined towards male servants Gillum to the exclusion of women, and was madly in love with a boy named Kohar, named after the Heavenly River in paradise. All lain even wrote poetry about him.

Hor is my faith and my worldly life, my sickness and my physician. Aw, he’s the most helpless of people who persistently seeks his beloved. No. On, on. So I was asking for sources here ‘cause I wanna make sure I, I have good sources on this. Mm-hmm.

On this guy dressing Zba Zda. This was his mom. Okay, so this [00:31:00] guy’s mom got annoyed that he was always sleeping with men.

So, she dressed up slave girls as boys, ah, to try to get them interested. Surprise woman. So she selected female slaves who resembled boys and dressed them in masculine attire with short hair and turbans, hoping to attract her son to them. It didn’t work. She wanted grandkids so

Simone Collins: bad. She wanted them so bad.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, it gets worse. So these cross-dressed girls were called Gula Mati and became a fashion that Al Marai popularized. He organized whole crop, corpse of them with Bob Hair belt and silt turbans who served at drinking parties. And then this became popular in the region because, you know, obviously the, the, the sultan is doing it.

And no, they’re like

Simone Collins: OG flappers except not feminist at all.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Eyewitness style reports preserved in historical compilations via Philip Heidi citing medieval [00:32:00] text describes elim female pages as Bob headed and dressed like boys and wearing silk turbans serving wine and blending erotic ambiguity.

That is so

Simone Collins: fascinating,

Malcolm Collins: just from, just from a fashion standpoint that even the lower classes begin to imitate it.

Simone Collins: Wow. This wasn’t fashionable cross-dressing based on one person’s. Not, not even one person’s sexual proclivities based on one mother’s desperate attempt to get grandchildren. That was totally botched.

That is so fun. Oh, delightful. Wow. I can’t even imagine being that mother and just being like,

Malcolm Collins: you,

Simone Collins: like,

Malcolm Collins: I need grandchildren. Right? Like that. Yeah. And then you start to

Simone Collins: see just normal people dressing like that and just being so freaking frustrated that, you know, I’ve, I’ve managed to set off a major fashion trend, but do I have grandchildren?

No.

Malcolm Collins: Aw. So if we’re talking about under, under Akbar or [00:33:00] J here J here was notorious for heavy opium and alcohol use. Detailed. In his autobiography, he describes daily hunts, mango feasts, and wine sessions,

Simone Collins: mango feasts, calling

Malcolm Collins: wine, a source of ecstasy. He owned hundreds of ornate wine vessels.

One of the, the fun ones here, this just seems

Simone Collins: like super. I mean, he, he just sounds ahead of his time if we’re being honest, aside from Mango. Okay. Okay. Well then we’ll go further. Oh, no. Honestly, no. People are all about mango feasts these days. They’re, they’re wine. They love collecting wine. Talk about addiction to opium and alcohol.

Well, let’s, let’s talk

Malcolm Collins: about the Ottoman Empire here, right? Because actually something that’s unusual, been through their palaces and their palaces are just like absurd. The Ottoman palaces mm-hmm. Isn’t cool or what? No, just in terms of their opulence and the way they were structured. If you look at something like the, the, the Versa, the main palace in France.

What’s that one? You know, Versailles. Versailles, yeah. Mm-hmm. Or the palaces in England. One, the palaces in England are not [00:34:00] that impressive. They’re

Simone Collins: pretty uncomfortable. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you go to something like the, the one in Scotland, what’s it called? Where they Balmoral? Yeah. Where the Royal family Summers, that entire house is maybe.

Five times as big as the house we live in. And I don’t consider my house small, particularly big, and it, it, the grounds are fine. They’re just like regular rich people grounds. If you look at the, the

Simone Collins: structure, it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t, it was always meant to be a private estate. The reason why some palaces are very big and grin as they were meant for entertaining, you were meant as, as a place of state.

Malor was always meant to be a country retreat. It is, is

Malcolm Collins: is, if you look at even like the main British palace, it’s just not that big. Bumping palace. Palace is

Simone Collins: pretty big

Malcolm Collins: and most of it is dedicated to statecraft, not for like a living in if you, if you look at versa, I think

Simone Collins: what what you’re missing though, and I don’t know why this might not have been the case, but I think this has to do more with like epidemiological history and not [00:35:00] other things.

Because a big trend that seems to have existed or been very common among English kings. Was you. You wouldn’t really have one big palace investment because you were constantly moving from one to the next to avoid the plague. Or some other disease outbreak. Well, also they had to bring it out. So you had to have a network of palaces.

Were small because people were not

Malcolm Collins: working sewer systems some of the time. Yeah, yeah. You had to

Simone Collins: air them out ‘cause they’d get too gross and crappy. And so then you’d just wait and let someone, I don’t roughly, metaphorically hose them down. And then you’d go to another one,

Malcolm Collins: something like Versailles. And this was very much the point of Versailles Uhhuh was to bring all of the nobles together.

So yeah, it was to

Simone Collins: create a jail for all of the, the elite and mobils who, or Nobles who otherwise would be on their own plotting against the kings. So it was, it was a giled jail. It was

Malcolm Collins: basically meant to overlook. So the, the Ottomans were at a different layer. Like if you look at the, the, the structure of the palace, it was just clearly pleasure room after [00:36:00] pleasure room, which is not a thing you had in the the Versailles or the English palaces.

So at its peak, you know, the design

Simone Collins: choices, just to be clear about European palaces, really had to do more with, with. Granting people increasing access of access to the king or the, the, the reigning monarch. And it was more about meeting spaces and whatnot. It wasn’t about, I mean, not really parties so much.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. It had, it had a 400 rooms at the De Pac Palace. 400 rooms. 400 rooms. And so, if we’re talking about Sultans, like Marad ii, who expanded the harem to up to 40 wives mm-hmm. Each separate quarters alongside dormitories for hundreds of slaves and fathering over a hundred children through relentless sexual pursuits.

1640 to 1648, known for his insatiable lust. He kept 300 concubines in addition to his 40 wives. That is

Simone Collins: exhausting. I would not [00:37:00] want to put up with that. That is, that’s just too many for you. Yeah, too, too. 300, too many.

Malcolm Collins: And, and these, these palaces the, the, the, the when, when Europeans would go there like in 1862, they were shocked.

Not just at the polygamy, but the regular nudity in the palace.

Simone Collins: Walking around naked,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, I I, I want to be clear. Well, you act

Simone Collins: as though the UK is so high and mighty with their palaces and no one was walking around naked there, but it was just too freaking cold. I’m sure they would have that. They could.

You know, we had the ability to maybe

Malcolm Collins: potentially get up to hijinks, like in the, the uk like farting competitions and stuff like that? No, that, that was

Simone Collins: France with the whole famous, that was

Malcolm Collins: France. Okay. I, I, yeah, again, the, the uk as, as we’ve pointed out, you typically get a gradient in the Muslim world, like the, the highest level of debauchery.

Then you get medium debauchery in the Catholic world. And they really got up to some stuff. [00:38:00] Any good stories you can tell us about Louis court or,

Simone Collins: oh well, king Louis, the xiv that, that, that is the one that was famous for the Yeah. Good stories

Malcolm Collins: about crazy.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There, well, it wasn’t de I mean, there was debauchery for sure, but, and that’s obviously, I always talk about Louis Philippe, the brother of Louis Vi xiv, who, who famously dressed like an absolutely fabulous woman and had a persistent male partner very much in the open, but no one really made a big deal out of it.

There was they, it was. Maybe this was actually Marie Antoinette’s court, but in, in one of the French courts, either the 16th or the the 14th, they had a farting contest to determine whose fart could sound most like a fine trumpet, which is just wonderful. And but to be fair, when they talked about the same sex relationships, I think they called it the Italian vice.

So I think that was more seen as an Italian slash room who were also

Malcolm Collins: Catholics, by the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But then like, so I think the, the further south you go, the more debauched it got. Because remember also in the, in the [00:39:00] court of king Henry viii, the whole thing with the. The, oh my gosh. The first wife Henry?

No, the second wife. And, and boy Lynn, the boy, Lynn sisters were kind of famous for being sexually mature and they could do all the fun stuff because they learned it in the French court. So basically the, the further down you got, but then the French court was, was Oh, those Italians. My gosh. Those Italians, yeah.

Yeah. So like is just a little more sexually out there. And I’d also point

Malcolm Collins: out with, with King Henry, the, I, I’m actually a big fan of King Henry Thei. I think he was. A pretty excellent monarch. And I think he is really unfairly thought of today. No he, he was not like his idea of debauchery was, was hunting tournaments.

Like I, that’s not like when he was younger. He was apparently like very fit. He was and would go on like, and, and was, he

Simone Collins: was very, very, very devoted to his wives. He I mean as my, he, yeah, he slept around and the only reason that he kept

Malcolm Collins: going through wives, by the [00:40:00] way, for people he wanted a male error.

Yeah. It’s because he didn’t want a male error for himself. He knew, because all British monarchs know this. If you don’t produce a male error that is existentially bad for the kingdom. Mm-hmm. They go to war with each other. If you don’t like, you almost always have a a, a revolution where like hundreds of thousands of people are going to die.

Two millions of people are going to die. Horribly if he cannot produce a male error. Not producing a male error was existential for the safety of his kingdom, right? Like that, that is what he believed from the history. And he also believed from medical knowledge at the time that women, when they couldn’t conceive it was, that’s something to do with their fault, right?

Like, the, he did not, there was no medical understanding that this, well, he was also

Simone Collins: a very faithful person, so he, I think, got. For his time. Reasonably paranoid that God was trying to send him messages, that when there were miscarriages and when there were other mishaps, that he was being told something’s wrong and he was trying [00:41:00] to listen and respond accordingly.

Malcolm Collins: And the Vatican could have just given him a dispensation. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: but except that there were corrupt ties and Catherine No. Were, they were completely nepotistic.

Malcolm Collins: The core reason, yeah, I remember they didn’t give a dispensation is because his first wife, who he was married to was the sister of a king in, I wanna say Spain or France, that had huge connections with the Pope, maybe even related to the Pope.

Yeah, I, I think

Simone Collins: Catherine or EOR had some kind of familiar relation. She was not very far removed from the Pope himself, so

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is obviously super corrupt for religion to do that and put that many people’s lives at risk, but they don’t care. You know, historic popes, they, they kill people. No problem.

But anyway the point I’m making here is the level of de degeneracy of, of its Islam. And if you watch old movies about the Middle East, like when you’re, like, how recent was the Islamic religion? Just a completely debauched religion. M