Episode Details

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

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

They explore deeper patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:00:00]

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

Simone Collins (2): Oh, not again,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right?

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

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so then I just started going through in my head, like the Ottomans, no. Like they were terrible in World War I like, like practically a joke [00:02:00] player. The, the Yo K