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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
Published on 1 year, 2 months ago