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 st...