Episode Details

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: