← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Decline of Islam
02:38:23
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- [00:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi, everybody, I'm Rudyard lynch and this is our co host, Austin Padgett. And we're back for another episode of History 102, where this episode is on the decline of Islam or medieval Islam.
- [00:32]
Austin Padgett
A very exciting topic, which will be brought to you today by a brand new microphone. So for all of you complaining on the audio, you're welcome.
- [00:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Nice getting this microphone.
- [00:44]
Austin Padgett
Apologies.
- [00:46]
Rudyard Lynch
This microphone really leveled me up. I got it because Andrew Heaton came over to my house and he said, the current microphone you have is terrible. You should buy this one instead. And it was an. Actually a pretty good decision.
- [00:58]
Austin Padgett
And yeah, sounds nice. My friend Jesse from Dad Saves America podcast, she knows exactly what to get. So she told me, I don't know about the settings. I just put them to random, like halfway lines. So we'll see how that works out.
- [01:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So I'm going to say two things before we get started. First of all is this is not a boring time period. And I feel the reason to articulate that, because if you were to go through the history 102s and pick out in a sort of distinct order what videos to see first, you would be drawn to World War II and the Civil War and the fall of Rome, and you would put this towards the bottom of your list, the decline of Islam over the medieval period. Because in most people's worldview, this is a footnote upon a footnote. And I find this deeply frustrating because this has been an era of history I've studied a tremendous amount about. And I say it's one of the most interesting eras of history. And we don't really process it because it exists in our sort of psychological shadow in a way we don't want to think about in a variety of ways. So it doesn't really process as part of our worldview. And when I briefly went to college for a semester and a half, I wrote three essays on medieval Islam. And it was one of my areas. It was actually my predominant area of speciality. And I've read four books on this in the last few months. And it's a time period that when studied improperly, comes across as terrifyingly boring. But when studied correctly, it's one of the most interesting eras of history. And I find it really sad that it's been so understudied. Because what you're looking at here is a sort of twisted mirror of Western civilization, where it combines elements both of the modern west and of classical civilization. And if you're to take a global perspective, Islam and Western civilization, out of the big four are the two closest civilizations. And there's an interesting book called the Case for Islamo Christian Civilization that articulates that. But I don't want to get carried away with that because, yes, Islam and Christendom have many similarities, but when you zoom out, they're also absurdly different in other ways. That's why it's a sort of useful mirror, because it's close enough you can see the distortion, but it's different enough that it's its own thing. And, and what you're looking at here is a combination of the fall of Rome with Oriental decay, where different civilizations have different cycles based upon what region of the world they're in. European societies, for example, tend to go too far, get too rich, go crazy, succumb to atheism and degeneracy. Empire falls apart, civilization restarts. That's what happened with Islam at the start of this time period. Oriental societies like India or China, they have a few golden ages, then their traditions solidify too much and they fossilize and they become highly susceptible to just utter stagnation. And so what you saw with medieval Islam is firstly, they had their fall of Rome and then they had their Oriental stagnation. So at the start of this time period, the Muslim world had a lot of similarities to the modern west that we'll study over the course of this video. But then by the end, they had sort of mutated into one of the fossilized civilizations like India or China, which saw very little differentiation or growth in their social structures from the era before the birth of Christ until European colonialism.
- [04:50]
Austin Padgett
And in terms of the significance of the fall of medieval Islam being ignored, do you think it would be like ignoring the fall of the Soviet Union 200 years from now or something like that? In terms of the missed significance, Andrew.
- [05:06]
Rudyard Lynch
Roberts, who's a conservative British historian, he's pretty good. He wrote in the 1990s with his sequel to Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking peoples, saying that 200 years from now, Hitler would either be perceived as the last great defender of Western civilization against the forces of atheism and communism or whatever, or he'd be seen as this tyrannical figure like a Genghis Khan. And that's how I think about the fall of the Soviet Union, where it depends who wins this current era of history. And I also want to say what Andrew Roberts did there was super impressive because calling that Hitler might have a redemption arc in the 90s at the height of blue pill history. That's pretty insane. And you guys know I hate Hitler. I think the Nazis are evil modernists who are basically as culpable as the communists in the destruction of Western civilization. But to be able to predict that that sort of sentiment would arise again in the 90s is pretty impressive. And I think you're articulating a pretty brilliant point that if let's say the devouring feminine or the bureaucracy survives past this current era, they will not be willing to look back on the falls of the Soviet Union because that's an era of history where their ideology fails in the same manner that this era of Islamic history is not politically useful for either the right or the left, which is why it's not really studied. What were your comments on that?
- [06:45]
Austin Padgett
Oh yeah, yeah. So because my, when I made that comparison in my mind we're 200 years in the future and the communism is well defeated as an ideology and it's. Maybe the Soviet Union wouldn't be as much of a threat in our minds or a significant in our minds 200 years later because we saw it was like defeated and irrelevant. Similar to how after the fall of Islamic the Middle east and medieval times. Why would you keep thinking about them 200 years when they're, they're not a threat, they're not on your conscious anymore. It's more like a bad dream you can forget.
- [07:23]
Rudyard Lynch
I was, I was making an assumption there about your opinion. So I apologize. That's a. You articulated that very well. Where until the time of the 70, the end of the 17th century, within a lifetime of Mozart and a little bit before the American Revolution, the Muslims had gotten out to Vienna and they were. The Turkish guns were feared across Europe. So it wasn't until a little more than 300 years ago that the Muslims were a threat to Western civilization. But part of the reason socialism has been so popular is that because the west has been ascendant, it hasn't had to defend its soul or its values to other societies. And so once the oriental empires were no longer a genuine threat to Western civilization, we stopped seeing the west distinct from other societies. And instead the west started self cannibalizing without an external threat.
- [08:23]
Austin Padgett
And I wonder, I mean with the Middle east today, I was thinking about this the other day. It seems like is it possible that the Middle east can modernize without also Losing Islam or becoming more secularized. And also that. I mean, there's two sides to that, because you can. Like in Europe, we became more secular with modernization, but Christianity can still work with modernization. So you can. Even if Islam can work with modernization, it's possible it will become more secular. So even the result of this won't prove what necessarily whether Islam can work with station. Many people still don't think Christianity can work with modernization. The trad. Super trad.
- [09:11]
Rudyard Lynch
It's very interesting because it speaks to the disconnecting both the left and the right's narrative on this topic, where the right. The right is sort of in a weird place. And you can see that in the historiography on this time period where there's been this large divide among the older generation of historians who studied this topic between was the Islamic Golden Age a legitimate manifestation of Islamic culture, or was it the carryover from an older society?
- [09:44]
Austin Padgett
And right where they were just kind of whitewashing it and saying, yeah, this is Islam. But then if you really looked at Sharia law, you'd realize it was violating it. And that's kind of the way that Jordan Peterson talked about Islam. He is. He distilled the problem as being that the law is in the text instead of like, based on the word and interpretable. And when the law is in the text, it's really hard to get away from it, because if anything goes wrong, people can be like, well, you're not doing what the text says. And so if anything goes wrong, then you revert to that. That's at least the theory.
- [10:18]
Rudyard Lynch
You have no idea what you just stepped into. We're going to get into 700 years of Islamic theological arguments of the thing you just said.
- [10:26]
Austin Padgett
You.
- [10:27]
Rudyard Lynch
In the Catholicism video, you said that it really showed you how the Catholics had all of these different trajectories that you didn't know about. And that's true of Islam, too, where if you're. For the centuries we're going to cover, from the 9th until the 15th through the 16th centuries, in each century, the Muslim world was doing something different, where they went through a lot of arcs over this time period. And as an example for what I'm trying for, when people talk about if the Islamic Golden Age was a manifestation of Islamic culture or the previous societies, I'm going to use a symbol to articulate it. That being a few centuries earlier, when the Arabs, or really the Berbers invaded Central France with Charles the Hammer and they were trying to take the Frankish Empire, they fought the Franks at the battle of Tours in central France outside Orleans and the Franks beat them. And historians have argued about whether this was a historic turning point. If the Arabs could actually have held France. And I'm not going to get into that, that belongs in the earlier video on the rise of Islam is.
- [11:40]
Austin Padgett
The.
- [11:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Current historians like to say that even if the Arabs did take central France, they would have given it up because the climate wasn't suited for them and they were overextending. And I think that's a manifestation of our sort of last man nihilistic theory of the world where the current history departments are really against conquest. Great man oriented history, historic variables have to crush human agency. And that's a huge bias historians have now. But what they'll say is that the Arab raiding parties in France, they were just sort of for sacking and for testing the water. And they said that because this wasn't a real invasion force, then you can't take it seriously. The thing though is that was always the consistent Arab strategy. They'd invade a new land with a large raiding party, see if they could destroy the king's army, how much stuff they'd take. And that would always be sort of the buttering up of the area for an additional army under a new warlord where the Arab military operated sort of like VC capital where a charismatic warlord would show up, he'd build a group of followers, they'd attack a land and then they divided up among this prescribed way where the Khalif would get one fifth of it. And so when you're looking at the Arab conquest of France. Yes.
- [12:59]
Austin Padgett
Like Cortez. Yes.
- [13:01]
Rudyard Lynch
They got the Spanish, got that from the Arabs directly. Right, good catch. I want to say, confirming all our.
- [13:10]
Austin Padgett
Connections from the past episodes.
- [13:12]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I want to say how much I appreciate you and how much you've genuinely increased the quality of the show.
- [13:18]
Austin Padgett
I appreciate that. It's a blast doing it. It's fun to be able to comment while you're listening.
- [13:24]
Rudyard Lynch
So the Arabs, they would launch raiding parties and they'd attack out. And the thing with that is it's symbolic of all of Arab civilization in this time period. And I'm going to start with Arab and then it's going to gradually become Persian and Islamic. And you'll see because this region of the world, consistently the one that has the most different variables going on. And you can see this in Persia, where Persia, just as a single country in the greater Muslim world, had a variety of different distinct religious groups that had all their own sort of mystic traditions. You had a variety of ethnicities, subplots going back to different eras of history, different noble families. And Persia's just one civilization. And what the Arabs did under the Prophet Muhammad was they conquered nearly the entire oikumene, or the known world, from the Atlantic out to India. And the earlier societies were largely tired and decadent. Where the reason the Arabs could do it was they had this greater degree of energy. But the Arabs were also desert barbarians who didn't have a level of civilization comparable to what the earlier societies were. And so early Islam was one of the most tolerant civilizations and religions in the world, because it had to be where the Muslims were a pretty small minority until 1000 AD when they hit a demographic tipping point. Because the Arabs would conquer a population. The Arab men would have large harems where all of the sons would identify as Arab, then they'd have harems. Arab tribes would migrate out. So there was this demographic outsurge. But the Arabs were totally dependent largely firstly on Christians who were of Syrian or Egyptian or Armenian or Greek ancestry. And so the Arab governance had to be highly tolerant towards the Christians because they were dependent on them for everything that wasn't religion or warfare. They later became dependent on the Persians, who had an earlier civilization going back thousands of years and were one of the great civilizations of the basically cycle two. And that was the shift from the Umayyad to the Abbasid caliphate, which was the Syrian Christian people as their dominant ruled allies to the Iraqi Persians as the dominant engine behind the empire. Because once the Arabs seized control of the region, they needed to work with the locals. And it was only when the Muslims became a demographic majority that Islam switched from tolerant to, to highly intolerant. Because you move from a group strategy of we have to assimilate the conquered to we have to standardize the people here. And why they did that is a whole different. You'll see it over the arc of the video. But in addition to that, when you look at that sort of tour, you're seeing Arab tribal warbands entering area, and they have to sort of assess what its level of development is to see how easy it is to conquer and what they could do. And so with Arab civilization at the turning point where you could no longer rely on the Prophet Muhammad's legacy to what became the decline of Islam is you saw that the Arabs had conquered the entire oikumene and they had become the great world civilization where the Arabs just assumed they were the greatest people in the world and they built Dar al Islam, or the House of Islam, as this Unified civilization. But once you've already conquered the world, what's next? And so the Arabs needed to evolve their identity past that. And instead what they did is they doubled down on traditionalism due to a lot of trauma they had over the medieval period, and they became a fossilized Asian civilization. And so when you're looking at this war band, you're seeing a group of Arabs trying to figure out how to subdue the land and sort of deal with all of these distinct threads like Greek or Persian or Egyptian or Christian or Indian civilization. And then they largely gave up. Rather than trying to fuse all of these distinct elements, they got in the middle of the map.
- [17:46]
Austin Padgett
And that's a pretty big frame switch as reasons for why they were nice to Christians. Because the religious tolerance is often pointed to by modern progressives as a reason for why the west, you know, isn't the only great place. And Islam was more. The Middle east was more sophisticated than us longer ago because they were so tolerant. Well, we were intolerant. It'd be funny if the actual reason for that was that they relied on Christians for their governance and various trade networks and things like that. And then your comparison with the settlement patterns is funny because it's obviously similar to the way modern Muslim immigrants act in Europe, which is tolerant as a minority and not tolerant as a majority, you know, through their own stated claims, which, you know, to be fair, is actually quite common. The opposite of. Of that is what's rare. That's what Western tradition is to have those values of like free speech for everybody. But, you know, the Soviets and the Nazis, they were only free speech when they were out of power and anti free speech when in power. That's which is the norm. That kind of hypocrisy without values is the historical norm. That's just a basic survival instinct or competing instinct.
- [19:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that. That's totally true. And the Muslims were never, quote, tolerant to be nice. A lot of the Muslim regimes in this time period were tolerant, but it was for distinct. It was for strategic reasons. And if you look at these various Muslim regimes, they were constantly kicking the Jews and the Arabs and the Zoroastrians to keep them down. Where it was always a policy of these conquered peoples have useful skills that were reliant on. And as an example, in Muslim Spain, which was Christian for most of the period from when the Muslims conquered it in the 8th century until the 11th century. And Muslim Spain, very briefly, was majority Muslim in the 11th century before the Christians from the north reconquered it, and then reconverted them to Christianity. So it was this sort of brief moment where you saw a historic glimmer of Spain becoming a Maghrebi country that was majority Arab and Muslim. And then the Christians won a geopolitical victory. And over the period that people were converting to Islam, the Muslims would do stuff like ban Christians from making new churches. They would create laws saying that they had to eat halal meat. They would ban them from eating certain like types of foods the Christians liked. It got pretty petty and autistic. I was reading this primary source from medieval Spain where he was categorizing all the distinct types of quote gross foods the Christians ate to ban them. To show the Christians that they weren't allowed to have their own distinct identity and they weren't allowed to maintain their own churches. So they build the churches before the Muslims took power and then they weren't allowed to maintain them or build new churches. So they were holding these ceremonies in these centuries old declining shacks. And that was standard practice across the Muslim world where they, they, it was, it was strategic. And as the Muslims got demographic superiority, they treated the Christians and the Jews worse. And the Muslims would sometimes discriminate against the Jews. Oftentimes they treated the Jews better than the Christians because the Christians were the majority and the Jews were the minority. So that they could use the Jews against the Christians, which was a big part of the anti Semitic sentiment in Spain, because the Jews had worked with right, left over.
- [21:37]
Austin Padgett
That is probably why they're so into ham too, like Iberian ham and all the Spanish ham. So they just went crazy once they were allowed to eat ham again.
- [21:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. And the logic you're articulating, and this is a great transition for to explain something is from a collectivist society's perspective, what the Muslims are doing is totally normal. Because the idea is what the group's needs are is the number one good. And there's no morality ahead of the group's needs. And breaking out of that was the Greeks and Christianity. Most societies never had that breakthrough. And so of course, from their perspective, when it's inside their self interest to work with the left or to champion certain values, they'll do so. But once it's no longer in their interests, they won't, because their underlying morality is the group's interests. And it reminds me of when I went to both Cairo and France, where this is a robe I bought in Cairo and this is an ebony staff I bought in Cairo. And I have a good story here where Merrick and I were in Cairo Marek's my best friend and he's my. He's my business manager. And we were in Cairo together. And I have a few stories there. I could get into them if you want, but we bought these Arab robes. And this was like, three years ago. And so Merrick and I. He started wearing the robe around Cairo and I was embarrassed because I came from the sort of dope, culturally misappropriate America. And then in Egypt, everyone was super excited. Where actually a lot of people thought he was Arab. And Merrick's of English ancestry. And in that's fine, you have everyone between those who look like white Americans or people walking up to him and speaking to him in Arabic. And that happened like, five times. And then people who look like black Americans, so all of the skin tones are in Egypt. And they were super excited. He was dressing like an Arab and they thought it was sort of, like, cool that people were interested in their culture. And. Yeah, it's weird when you see distortions like that.
- [23:48]
Austin Padgett
He's got the. For it. Merrick does. Nice, nice, Good twirl.
- [23:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [23:54]
Austin Padgett
But, yeah, I was surprised when I was in Turkey that people thought I was local just because I had the leather jacket and hoodie.
- [24:01]
Rudyard Lynch
This is something I've been thinking a lot about in the last few weeks leading up to making this video, is when you drive across Middle America, you see lots of highly distinct cultures that are forced together into this shared highway system and this shared sort of imperial structure. And I think America's actually more of a different country due to globalization, due to the introduction of more foreigners, and also the managerial class going crazy. So you can drive from California to Texas and see five distinct cultures which are forced together into the same imperial highway system, same military. And that's very much how the Muslim world was in. In the time period. We're going to start in with the Abbasid Caliphate and we're going to start with the fall of the Abbasids and end with the Ottomans and the Safavids in the gunpowder era, where Islam went through an entire anime arc in between. And the. The Abbasid Caliphate was a wealthy, centralized system. And one of the big historians of Islam, Marshall Hodgson, talks a lot of the term the Oikomene, or the known world, because from the Muslim perspective, they were the only civilization that mattered. Where the Raw, um, or the Byzantines, they were respectable, but they were now redundant to the Prophet Muhammad. The Farangi, or the Franks, were as savage as animals. They had the same attitude towards the Africans. They saw the Indians like Pagan degenerates. And they saw the Turks as savages and they created these legends of these sort of like immortal jade gates states in Central Asia. And they saw the Chinese as a different sort of dimension who still somewhat respectable, but also they did not know the wisdom of the Prophet. And so they had this sort of cohesive sense of the world. And inside the debate about whether Arab civilization was a real thing, some older historians like McNeil say that it was a continuation of the earlier Middle Eastern civilizations. And Islam is a uniquely difficult civilization to categorize because it's based off a single guy, that being the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet Muhammad is likely the singular individual who has changed the course of history the most because he made Islam's legal code, he made their political structure, he made their religion. Islamic law is literally just them autistically obsessing over things the Prophet Muhammad said in his daily life. Through assessing the layers of connection to the Prophet Muhammad and the plausibility of these sayings of his.
- [26:35]
Austin Padgett
And so don't rob Allah of the credit from those divine words he put in his mouth.
- [26:41]
Rudyard Lynch
Jeez, yes.
- [26:41]
Austin Padgett
What do you think? The guy came up with it on his own.
- [26:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, so true. And so the Prophet Muhammad created Islamic civilization, but it worked because it tapped into an underlying bedrock. And this is something that Spengler and Chris Dawson talk about of this earlier sort of Semitic civilization that had developed under the Byzantine and the Persian rule that the Arabs were able to tap into. And you have a variety of other elements between the Greeks, the Persians, earlier remnants of Egyptian or Babylonian culture, Jewish, weird, fanatical, messianic religious cults. You had a lot of alchemy, you had Greek philosophy, people from India, where when you're talking about sort of the oikomen, you're talking about the Muslims perceived themselves as the sole world order that was important. And so once they conquered the entire region and unified it under Dar al Islam into this cohesive central system, the question is, what would they do next? But to jump back to an earlier point, I was, I was trying to convey is McNeil says that the Islamic civilization was a continuation and failure of an earlier Middle Eastern trajectory that pulled from the Greeks in a lot of ways. Gustave Le Bon, who is one of my new favorite writers, he was a 19th century Frenchman who traveled around Asia. He says that the Arabs had their own civilization. They grafted onto their. Onto its own sort of root. And the Islamic Golden Age was the genuine sort of efflorescence of a new society that just was not able to Sustain it. And I've leaned over to Gustav lebon's thesis and lebon was super right wing. He was a social Darwinist. He would write. He wrote multiple books at the Foolishness of the Crowd. He wrote a book about the influence of race on history. But he's also pretty appreciative of foreign cultures. He wrote books on India and Islam, I think were very fair, stuff like that. And so he goes through all of the distinct fields the Arabs were involved in. And you end up with weird questions of what Arab means, because there's the original Arabian desert that the Arabs formed in to conquer the entire region. And then there were Arabs that migrated out, but sort of like Latino, which masks all of these racial and continental and ethnic differences. A Spaniard, a Argentine and a Mexican are all some variety of Latino. It's a real identity, is just highly dispersed. And Arab is similar where it masks people who. Myron Gaines is ethnically Sudanese. He looks like a black American. He says he's an Arab. I mean, he is an Arab because he is Sudanese. Then you have people who look white who are Arabs. The Maghrebis speak a dialect of Arabic that's incomprehensible from Syrian Arabic. Syrians and Iraqis have different dialects of Arabic. And so when you're looking at Arab, it's this broader continental identity from Morocco to Zanzibar in Tanzania and to Iran. But it masks Syrian, Maghrebi, Iraqi, all of these national identities which are weaker in the Muslim world. Where in the Muslim world you have overlapping identities, much like medieval Europe with Dar Al Islam. Then you have Sunnis and Shias. Then you have the different legal schools inside the Sunnis and the Shias. Then you have the national identities like Syrian or Libyan or whatever. Then you have the sub regional identities like the Jazira in North Iraq or the Swamp people of South Iraq. Then you have the clan and you have the tribe. And these are all real identities that overlap against each other. Much like in medieval Europe you had this exact same thing. And it's made state formation in the Muslim world very hard because at any given time you can pull on one of these sub identities for a specific context. And it's sort of like in Celtic culture. You have these huge overlapping genealogies. You map who's related to who, whose fourth cousins. All of Islamic politics is that.
- [31:04]
Austin Padgett
Mapping family trees.
- [31:06]
Rudyard Lynch
So Ibn Khaldun, who we're gonna speak to later, he's the greatest Islamic historian writing in the 14th century. He has a lengthy segment about how maintaining the purity of A bloodline is super important for the survival of a ruling house. And the reason he gives is not predominantly eugenic, that you'll lessen the quality of your blood. It's that if you outbreed too much, you're going to create too large a circle of tribal dependence. So when a crisis hits, if you've outbred too much, it means there are too many people you are held accountable for. So that when times get tough, because your tribal currency is the thing that holds the society together, if you dilute the strength of the tribe, it means you'll have too many dependents who ask things from you, but then aren't actually willing to fight and be super, super, super supportive of the regime. So that's why you have to marry inside your clan.
- [32:02]
Austin Padgett
Kind of like the incentives of the Indian dowry, making marriage more of a tough sell.
- [32:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's the same thing where in India, caste is the most important, where caste is a fusion of social class, ethnicity and religion into a single thing. And so castes. And so when in India, when you're marrying inside the castes, you're marrying inside what's effectively an extended family or a clan, but the clan is metastasized into five other things. In the Muslim world is the singular place on earth where cousin marriages are most common. If you look at a marriage of cousin marriages, a map of cousin marriages around the world, Islam is so far ahead of everywhere else.
- [32:48]
Austin Padgett
Oh, I guess if you're marrying a cousin, then you're expanding your family tree less because you're doubling it. Doubling it up.
- [32:55]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [32:57]
Austin Padgett
As my toddler says, it's his favorite expression. Let's double this up.
- [33:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Nice.
- [33:02]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. So it's like a wolf walking in its own tracks. Yeah, you basically. Yeah, that whole cousin line is already in there together. And does this relate at all to the Shia thing where the spiritual leaders are kind of descended, supposed to be descended from Muhammad.
- [33:20]
Rudyard Lynch
I can't open that can of worms now. It's going to be too painful. I have to clean out the earlier threads before we get to the Shia Sunni. So to clean out the. A few things I was trying to convey, first of all is the Muslim world was a unified system like America, that was this continental empire where Arab globalization masks these underlying differences. And there's a few similarities in the modern west and the Islamic Golden Age, one of which is the idea that much like modernity, we are so separated from the past that we're not really dependent on it. Because the rise of the Prophet Muhammad was such an important moment that it cut history in half. And so the Arabs were capable of these sort of delusions in the same way modern people are, because they had a cultural technology that was so enormous it shattered their conception of the world, which is what modern history has done to the world. And so we use the myth of modernity to paper over these real differences in the same way the glory of Dar al Islam or the House of Islam was enough to paper over these genuine differences inside the Middle East. What happened with the fall of the Abbasids, which, it's sort of pure imperial collapse vibes, it's one of the top examples that people should put in books alongside the fall of the Maya or Easter island or the Romans or the Bronze Age collapse. People really forget it is that the Arabs had done a good enough job unifying the region so that it became a singular civilization. Even at the time of the fall of the Abbasids, it was a minority of people in the Muslim world who were Muslim historians of this time period call it the Islamicate world, not the Islamic world, to convey that the Muslims were not the dominant force. They were a ruling elite and people. The Arabs were either town dwellers or nomads, which was parallel to what they were back in Arabia. And the Prophet Muhammad was a special figure because he was capable of unifying the town dwellers and the nomads with a single belief structure because they had earlier been at war. And Islam allowed the transcendence of these clan loyalties, which is why it was so successful in a region of the world totally dependent on said clan structures. And with the fall of the Abbasids, which we'll get through how that happened, you saw the upswelling of these formerly dead identities, either through sort of Muslim clothing or through just local nationalism, much like how the fall of European colonialism did that with the previous identities that the Europeans had brought into the global order. And these post colonial European identities, these, these post colonial identities are stuck in this weird trap of being both dependent on the European structures and hating the Europeans but also admiring them. And it's the same deal with the Islamic world here. And the second thread is that upon studying this enough, I think the Islamic Golden Age was a genuine sort of development of Arab civilization because it wasn't concentrated among certain ethnicities. Some people say that the Persians were the driving variable of the Islamic Golden Age. And that's true to a very strong point, especially the Khorasanis, the North Persians, because most of the great thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age were not Arabs in the strictest sense. They weren't people from Arabia, but they were people from the broader culture. And people who were self identified as Arab were important in the Islamic golden age. But Persians were overrepresented. There was a lot going on in Spain. Spain was one of the most developed and most developed and powerful places on earth. And it was the most important area in Europe for parts of the early medieval period. The Maghreb also had stuff going on. But the Islamic Golden Age was a genuinely wealthy and successful period across any conceivable metric. You'd look in the Gustave Le Bon book, he says about how the Arabs were involved in the creation of algebra or zoology, geopolitics, history, mathematics, philosophy, religious analysis, mysticism. And I'm not even naming half of them. Where the Arabs had pretty interesting thinkers and the Arab hallmark of their type of thinker was the polymath. So the Arabs or the Muslims in general, were very good at generating polymaths or Renaissance men. And a lot of the Renaissance culture stemmed originally from the Arabs. And I have to stop saying Arabs, because soon the Persians and other peoples across Dar Al Islam will become the predominant drivers of this, where it democratized from Arabs to other identities. And you see this sort of Islamic golden age in a way that's too deep for it to just be a peripheral thing. Because you look at these Islamic cities like Cordoba or Damascus or Al Qairouan, which was different from Cairo, which was called Fustat or Merv or Nishapur or Samarkand, is these places would have entire streets of libraries and bookstores, entire streets of selling exotic food. They would have you hear these stories of just sort of like some of the highest decadence possible with Harun al Rashid having these huge harems and walled gardens and palaces. And degeneracy was one of the hallmarks of medieval Islam. One of the most sort of core threads where Islam only became morally puritan in the 18th century as a reaction to European colonialism. They were super degenerate and sort of the sexual. It was a very sexual society. Courtly love culture was from this European. Courtly love culture is from the Muslim world. Homosexuality was totally accepted among the upper classes, if you were the one penetrating. A lot of the most important figures were homosexuals. And when Europeans conquered the Muslim world, the 19th century, they would openly refer to the Arabs as homosexuals. And you had harems, of course, and you would have like. There was a huge amount of erotica in this time period which was fused with religious concepts of basically the duality of the masculine and the feminine. And women weren't veiled until the late Middle Ages.
- [40:04]
Austin Padgett
There.
- [40:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Women, sorry, final thing. Women had. Women had practical legal equality with men under the Abbasids, where they would, they would. They weren't veiled, they weren't secluded. Women were allowed to be judges at the height of the Abbasid empire. They were allowed to own their own property. They were not. They were allowed to sort of operate in society. And in a lot of these Muslim courts, you had very powerful Queensland and very powerful female authorities. There were female philosophers and artists. And Islam's sort of control of women and misogyny is a reaction to women having significant social status in this time period, at least earlier on.
- [40:47]
Austin Padgett
This is very much like when you learn that the deterministic biblical interpretations didn't really become common until the 1800s. For Christianity to think that there's no kind of veiling at all in the past of Islam is pretty big mind shift. Was there. Did they have no other cycle of this? And does that mean that Sharia law is easily interpreted to not mean you have to wear black?
- [41:15]
Rudyard Lynch
So the reason Islam was so popular in the beginning was there was a radical simplification where Christianity had become a lot of distinct sects that were at war with each other. And what the Prophet Muhammad did was that, okay, I'm going to short circuit the entire religious structure. And the Quran is basically lists of rules. People say it's super well written and poetic, but it's mostly lists of rules. And that was the point where they were trying to structure. If this is a religion, this is how you interface with the community, this is what you do on a daily basis. This is the theological structure. We're going to cut out the Trinity, we're going to cut out the angels, or not the angels, we're going to cut out the complex priest church structure. Because they were looking at the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. And Islam doesn't have that which is really important where in Islam, the relationship between the believer and God is always direct. And they don't have a church hierarchy. They have councils of elders who are often wealthy professionals in town called the ulama. And the ulama meet up and they discuss the Quran and they create the structure that all the Muslims in there who are under their tutelage follow. And a difference in Christianity and Islam is that the Catholic Church has a central hierarchical structure where the Pope can set agendas and plan and then order people around. In Islam, it's decentralized, where, yes, you do have the Khalif, who's a combination of spiritual and political Authority, sort of like if the Roman emperor was also the Pope. Because there's no differentiation in religion and culture, in Islam and government. They're all the same thing. Islam is a coherent society. It's not really a religion. In the same way that in the west, there was a separation between those two. But because the ulama don't have leadership or power, they end up in these situations where they sort of. They sort of back each other. I was going to say they jerk each other off and say back each other up. And I thought both of them are sexual, which is not good for a religion that's still alive. I'm trying to find a metaphor for them supporting each other in their opinions. That is not sexual.
- [43:24]
Austin Padgett
They had each. Yeah, you already did that one.
- [43:26]
Rudyard Lynch
So they mutually interpreted the Quran in a manner. I'm trying to be respectful Muslims. Hopefully. This video is a testament that I genuinely.
- [43:34]
Austin Padgett
They were bros. They brought out.
- [43:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, they brought. Okay, Muslims who are watching this. Do not take this as disrespect for your culture. If I've put this much effort in already, I do care. And so they mutually interpreted the Quran in a manner where they. They would become more socially conservative over time. And so the Quran itself is fairly simplistic. What happened, though, is that to turn Islam into a social structure for large urban populations, not desert, not desert nomads, you had to build an entire legal structure. And that's where the hadiths come in. And the hadiths are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which are then extrapolated into Islam's legal structure. And there are theories that the Prophet Muhammad never existed, which I find extremely doubtful considering how much the entirety of Islamic legal structure is predicated upon the Prophet Muhammad's existence. The Prophet Muhammad is one of these singular figures in history who is best recorded because people will go through, oh, he said these things and then these things and that stuff. No, I won't go off on that tangent. So once you add all of the hadiths and the customary law, Islam becomes all consuming. And that was a shift. Once Islamic philosophy ended in the late Middle Ages, they sort of started doing those things, and that's when it solidified around the customary law. And Ibn Kaldun, who, we'll talk a little later. He existed, a tipping point where this. Where Islam stopped being this sort of organic tradition and it became a list of rules, which is what happens to every religion. And Islam became divided between the. The different legal schools of the Shia and the Sunni, between, like, the Maliki, the. The Maliki or there were the. There were a litany of these. I need to. I'll forget them now. This is embarrassing, but Islamic. Do you have a. Do you have a point here?
- [45:43]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. So Islam basically started as open source and then calcified, while Christianity started as closed source, like within the Catholic Church. And I noticed it can't be any coincidence that the Christian world overcoming the Muslim world happens to coincide at the same time as the Protestant revolution, which is where the Christians shifted to a structure in which they could have a direct relationship with God, like Islam in the beginning, before it went the other direction.
- [46:18]
Rudyard Lynch
So to finish, the different schools are Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi for the Sunnis and for the Shia, it's the Ismailis, Jafari, Zaydis and others. And these are sometimes in competition. They're mostly not where a certain university will be Hanafi, another one will be Shayifi. And people of these different schools can relate to each other, be friends, cooperate for certain reasons. They can't kill each other, though. The point you said is incredibly intelligent. And that's something that historians on this topic only find after going into it very deeply. Where McNeil, who's one of my favorite historians, parallels the rise of Shia fanaticism that you saw manifest most openly with the Safavids in Persia, with the Protestant Reformation, which happened at the same time in Europe. And what happened in Islam was that. And we have to go through Islam's intellectual trajectory, they went through a mystic phase that ended in sort of like erotic mystic degeneracy. And then they had a social conservatism kick in with sort of legalism. They had a mystic, a mystic direct connection with God, fanatical reaction to that which ultimately got crushed.
- [47:37]
Austin Padgett
Where.
- [47:39]
Rudyard Lynch
The Shias and the sort of mystic connect with God directly. Muslim types who were dominant in the high Middle Ages, in the late Middle Ages, they were crushed by the Ottoman Sunni Orthodoxy, where the Ottomans were more by the books. Let's keep this religion practical and traditional. And that would be as if in Europe, the Catholic Orthodoxy under the Spanish beat out Protestantism and the Spanish unified Europe under the Inquisition and their monopolies. And under the central crusading religion, where we've spoken in multiple videos on how the Spanish and the Ottoman empires were quite similar. And what would happen in the Muslim world is that to compare to Europe, it's that after Europe's period of high medieval chaos, if the Catholic Church crushed the Protestants and then Europe became this Catholic theocracy that never had The Enlightenment or science or these things where you would have seen science in these potentials in medieval Europe that you see could have culminated in Western civilization's dominance, but they were crushed. This is such a good framing. Thank you. Where in the Muslim world This really works In Muslim world. In the Muslim world the orthodox people won. And so the same sort of creative tendencies that you saw in medieval world in medieval Europe were there in medieval Islam. They just didn't go anywhere. Which is why when people look at Islam now, they never, they see that those, they do not see those tendencies were ever there.
- [49:17]
Austin Padgett
And it's because these different intellectual schools of thought kind of calcified into norms almost kind of like Protestant sects. Does that mean like if you have really strong sec. Sectarian Protestantism, will it end up back in like a Catholic Church versus is a non denominational approach the only way to actually maintain an open source? And then there's the semantics of like the levels of organization. I guess.
- [49:45]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm going to tell you no, but explaining why will take too long.
- [49:51]
Austin Padgett
At least we learned something. Yeah, and I'm just thinking totally off the top of my head too.
- [49:57]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't worry about it. It's all chill vibes. If as I like to say, if nobody dies, it'll work out and if someone still dies, it will still work out.
- [50:06]
Austin Padgett
People die.
- [50:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And when you look at the Abbasids with their fall, it, as I said before, it's very much sort of standard collapse narrative. And there's a lot of interesting similarities to modern to modern civilization. And one of my good friends who worked for me for a few years, he was an expert on Persia and Central Asia. He's a guy my age and he was, he's quite sharp where he had made the realization if I autistically study a single area of the world more than anyone else, I can become the expert on the topic and then have different people who study this. They'll have to come to me to know how to deal with it. And so he did that for Central Asia and Persia and he and I have spoken deeply about this topic. Where I once made an offhand remark about the modern west isn't like medieval Persia where medieval Persia was this static traditional society. And he said no Rudyard, you're utterly incorrect here. Medieval Persia was a highly dynamic, changing society and what you said is completely unfair. He ordered me three books in the topic that changed my mind and I read through them. Thank you. And but medieval is what was my rant before that? Oh, classic collapse Narrative. So with the 9th century, when we're going to start, the Muslim world was divided into three great states. You had the Abbasid caliphate governed out of Baghdad, one of the great cities in the world of over a million people. And they stretched from the Indus river and nearly the frontiers of China out to Egypt. And they went up against the Byzantines. They were likely, besides the Chinese, the most powerful and populous nation on earth. Then you had the Berbers in North Africa. And the Berbers are one of the oldest people in this region of the world. They're older than even the Aryan conquerors of Europe. They're older than the Arabs or the Carthaginians. Where actually the Berbers genetically of lot of similarities to the laps. And I always find the Berbers to be interesting. And they'll keep popping up over the course of this video where the Berbers used a radical sect of Islam that was anarchist. And these anarchists kept popping up again over the medieval Islamic world where they were the Islamic equivalent of communists, where Islam has its own messianic tradition parallel to the Christian. And that whenever or in many cases when the Islamic world has issues, these messianic culture, the reset button to get society to cooperate because the collective unconscious is thinking the world is ending, we have to return to the Prophet Muhammad's teachings as a reset button. And so these messianic anarchists, who I think they were called Zayeedis, I'd have to look this up, but they worked with the. No, they're not the Zaidis, Sunni, Shia and third group.
- [53:17]
Austin Padgett
Right. So like actual Sharia law reset can be kind of like communist anarchist.
- [53:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. Where. No, that's definitely the case. And that's part of the thing you see with, with the, with the Muslim world, these parallels to modern civilization where these Muslims Sharia types were anarchists and they popped up in Azerbaijan with the fall of the. With the fall of the Abbasids and they formed a communist anarchist religious group where they get the lower classes and they say that the ultimate culmination of the Quran was communism and social sort of progressivism. The Berbers worked with them to drive out the Abbasids. And they were the first people in the Muslim world to do so. The Berbers were also the hardest people to conquer in the Muslim world. And they were one of the most important threads in medieval Islam until the Black Death when they were hit disproportionately. Where the Berbers were a majority of the Maghreb until the Black Death. The Black Death for some reason killed them more than The Arabs. And then the Arabs gained a demographic majority. And so the Berbers were consistently able to use these religious radical tendencies. And they were also popular in Yemen where. Yemen in Arabia, where there were. Where I think they popped up after with the arrival of the Umayyad Caliphate. And so there were always these Islamic radical egalitarian sects who would say stuff like the successors to the Prophet Muhammad should not be his blood descendants and it should not also be through Abu Bakr where the Sunni Shia divide was originally a political between. Do you support going through Ali who married the Prophet's daughter Fatima, or do you go through Abu Bakr who. Or it might be after Abu Bakr where there's a. There's a succession issue between these two. And they had a battle in the area between Iraq and Arabia over who got to take Muhammad's succession. And this has since become crystallized as one of the great battles in Islamic history where the Sunnis won and the Shias went underground. And the Shias always had this messianic impulse that they would use over this time period where they would summon the Mahdi. And the Mahdi was the Prophet figure, Messiah figure, who could, much like in Dune, who would drive out the evil world and bring about what's effectively the Book of Revelations. And so you would see Mahdis pop up in most Islamic countries under periods of stress. And the third group, who I believe to be in fact, check me, the Zayidis. No, it's the Kharijis, the Kharigis. The Kharigis were even more anarchist than them. They did not support any pre established structure because the will of God cannot be structured. And so they said that it should just become obvious who the Mahdi and the Prophet is and then we should congregate around that figure. And that hierarchy and social structures were innately bad. So this would periodically create these enormous revolts that could concentrate power like the Berbers or during the fall of the Abbasids. But these sorts of anarchists became highly dangerous and were gradually purged from the Muslim world, especially as the memory of the Prophet Muhammad grew weaker. That they. That the sort of allure of these radical Islamic egalitarian cults went down. But I believe they still maintained power in Oman. The Oman are Khourijis, but they've come to terms with it and they've sort of calmed down. Where in a few different places, such as the rise of the Abbasids or with Shah Ismail or with the Fatimids and the actually Almohads pretty consistently, oftentimes radical Shia messianic cult shows up. Charismatic capable leader rises to the top, uses cult to seize power, gains the instruments of power, then turns back on his own revolutionary movement. Where in the Abbasids very attached to Persian Shia nationalism, which was often fused, seized from the, seized the Umayyads. Then the leader who was considered one of the greatest Islamic leaders turned on the Shia, converted to Sunniism because Sunniism was the easier ideology to govern the empire.
- [57:56]
Austin Padgett
That's a, that's a pretty big flip. Like how do you rise to power on Shia and then go Sunni?
- [58:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Because at that point the Shia and the Sunni were largely a political difference. They hadn't ossified a different theologies yet.
- [58:14]
Austin Padgett
Okay, okay. And, and then what? Wasn't Muhammad not a very anarchist like figure? So how did going back to his direct will, did the autist go wrong somewhere in their interpretation?
- [58:28]
Rudyard Lynch
Muhammad's hard to categorize. Muhammad is sort of like, he's sort of the vortex this all came from. And, and when you're looking at these figures with divine inspiration, divine inspiration is so complicated and sort of schizo that you can look at it and you can't really put it in a box. And so there's these distinct elements to Muhammad where he was sort of, he had organizational elements, he had anarchist elements, he had rebel organizer. Because keep in mind Muhammad at his time, the thing he was biggest known for was nuking the earlier Arabs social structure. We don't think about it because the earlier Arab social structure is largely remembered in terms of the thing Muhammad nuked. And so he was a social radical and an anarchist in destroying the rules of the old society and then rebuilding it in Islam to create this new sort of modern world. So the Muslims always had that impulse of what if we just got Muhammad again?
- [59:27]
Austin Padgett
Right. And what if he. We kept going in that direction instead of straying from the path Muhammad set us on.
- [59:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [59:34]
Austin Padgett
It takes time to perfect the world.
- [59:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So with the fall of the Abbasids, you had the Berbers who were part of this revolutionary sentiment and they became a sort of a free barbarian people on the side of the Abbasids. And the Abbasids actually gave up a lot of their empire peacefully, which is a weird element they share with European colonialism where either Harun Al Rashid, who is both a degenerate but also a good king, there's the tipping point in Islamic rulers. Are you a savage barbarian or are you a degenerate? And you fit somewhere on these axis and, but you can have, you can be both at certain points. It's just the degeneracy eats at your savagery. And Harun al Rashid was a tipping point. I think his son after him, Mamun, I could be getting that wrong. He was also capable. But then after that the, it was, it was pretty pathetic actually, where the Abbasid caliphs would just not leave their pleasure gardens in Baghdad. They would permanently be partying with women and eating ice cream, which had to be imported from the Caucasus, of course, and engaging in like art and philosophy and funding beautiful things. And they gradually gave up the provinces where either Harun or his son gave up Iflakia or left Libya in Tunisia to the local governor because he did not want to deal with it and he frankly did not care about it. He was just like, you're the governor, bro, you can just have it. I don't want to have to think about Ifriqia. And it's like how the British and the French gave up their colonial empires in Africa in the same manner due to their own decadence, which was created by their own sort of modern myth of hubris of being better than the rest of history. And that's how the Abbasid empire fell. There's several elements where Egypt had its own barbarian Turkic governor called Toulun who declared independence from the Abbasids. Then Persia had their own Shia nationalist revolt under the Buyids that broke Persia, which was the core of Abbasid power, under its own Persian identity, which was followed by a neo Persian renaissance that lasted from the 9th through the 11th centuries, where the Persian language and the Persian nobility and art system popped up again under the new Muslim clothing. Unlike the sort of decaying Zoroastrian Persia that the Arabs conquered. And you saw a lot of very strange things. Again, Azerbaijan, which was ethnically Persian, had those messianic anarchist revolts. Southern Iraq was potentially majority black because the Arabs had the largest slave trade in history. And I always wondered as a teenager, if the Arabs had such a large slave trade, why aren't there large populations of blacks in the Middle east equivalent to the New World? And the short answer is that they castrated the men and they didn't use the back the blacks as sex slaves.
- [62:43]
Austin Padgett
And so I was going to say it seems very similar to South America. It's the only place that's as diverse as South America. If it weren't for the parts of Africa being in the Middle east, then you wouldn't have any black people. But Africa makes up for it.
- [62:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Most of those countries like Egypt and Iraq are about 10% sub Saharan African. The people the we was Kangs crowd. They say that ancient Egypt were black, but the ancient Egyptians and even through the Romans in the early Arab period were less black than the modern Middle Easterners or the English.
- [63:15]
Austin Padgett
The Egyptians rivals downriver were black and occasionally they got in charge. But it's like when the Mongols got in charge of China, but even more rare, it's not China.
- [63:27]
Rudyard Lynch
I had a brief autistic screeching moment in my mind when you called the Sudanese black because they're a distinct racial group, as distinct, as significantly more distinct than Europeans are from Asians. But I also realized I just called Myron Gaines black and he's Sudanese, so I'd be breaking my own moral code. So I had a deep sort of primal moment of autistic screeching in my own subconscious.
- [63:51]
Austin Padgett
I don't know if I'd call it moral code, maybe semantic choices.
- [63:54]
Rudyard Lynch
No, no, you don't understand. You burned on me. I have to convey this era correctly because no one else is going to read about this topic. Got one shot cries so southern Iraq was potentially majority black. They also had anarchist, anarchist messianic revolts that were brutally crushed and they seized control of southern Iraq, where the fall of the Abbasid empire is distinctly pathetic because the Abbasids didn't die in a sort of glorious Gotterdammerung. It was like the fall of Rome where the barbarians eat at the edges of the empire until the Abbasid Caliph is turned into a powerless pope figure, first under the governance of Persian nationalists, then the Seljuk Turks. And you can see all of the same trajectories in the decline of the west, in the decline of this Islamic golden age where as an example, the government funded socialism, the government would get into regulations, the government would have welfare programs to the same consequences. They started limiting work hours on the free market. And you saw the rise of atheism and agnosticism and feminism, all of which were huge. And we Forget this, but 10th century Dar Al Islamic got nearly as agnostic and nihilistic as the modern west where most of the Islamic universities were dominated by these secular, these secular people called the Mutazila free thinkers. And when Al Ghazali started having the reactionary Islamic intellectual revolt against these free thinker, atheistic free thinkers who had seized control of the Umayyad, sorry, the Abbasid government, when he was doing that right wing religious reactionary revolt, he was actively suppressed for years and he had to wage sort of a media campaign against the dominant sort of liberal, cosmopolitan, agnostic line where he after years of suffering and intellectual battles on their version of sort of when Breadtube argues with right wing YouTubers, he finally got the normal people support against the elites. So the elites had to adjust on their position because as the empire declined, the general public became more religious. And so with Islam's conservatism, you saw these cosmopolitan, often merchant based elites because Islam had a highly advanced capitalist economy with a stock market, with VC capital, commercial agriculture, trading operations that spread from Western Europe to China and down to Africa. And Islam's elite at this point were bourgeoisie capitalists. So that sort of cosmopolitan scientific business elite lost out to both rural peasants, religious, religious scholar, social conservative elites and barbarians. But if you look at the world of the late Abbasid caliphate, all of the philosophic schools that you would see in Western Europe were present. And I was reading a history of Islamic thought by Morrissey that was very good. It's a hard topic to write well, but the author pulled it off between they had rational materialists, they had atheists, they had people who had principles similar to the free market which Ibn Khaldun was part of, they had people who had more sort of socialist egalitarian politics, they had people who said the spiritual permeated all of reality, they had Aristotelian materialists. And you see the same philosophic beliefs in every higher civilization over history, whether in the ancient world or the modern world, depending on context, certain variables went out over others. And the Mutazila free thinkers were the scientists and they were genuinely on to something where they, the Muslim world didn't have science in the way that we use that word, but they had wide scale logic and learning and they were on the edge of science because this was the singular time period that alchemy was most popular in history. There were two cities around the Jazeera and north Iraq and Syria, which made hermeticism their dominant religion. And hermeticism is all about testing your underlying theses and comparing distinct forces together to reach outcomes. So they were doing alchemy as an Arabic word and it was chemistry basically. Yeah, chemistry is another Arabic word, same as alcohol. And so when you're looking at the fall of the Abbasid world, realize that the dominant elite of this society were people who said that Islam basically had no direct value or direct truth, indistinct from the Greeks or the Persians, where they'd become so cosmopolitan they built this, I would say heavily hermetic worldview about that degenerated about Islam is a pantheistic religion where we can pull from the Greeks or the Persians or these distinct thinkers to create a new superstructure. And what most people in the Muslims saw is. Wait, you guys are basically atheists, right? What Al Ghazali and the reaction to this was was the general public making Islam the dominant operating system to take revenge for their basically liberal cosmopolitan business elites that had dominated the empire that had fallen.
- [69:57]
Austin Padgett
Fascinating, because the pantheist one is very similar to the modern universalist concept where you put God. If you put God into everything, like the structure and fabric of the universe, then he's actually nowhere. Like you've written him out of the equation by making him indistinguishable from the materium. It's kind of like the same things the Christians did like we talked about in that other episode.
- [70:21]
Rudyard Lynch
You have.
- [70:22]
Austin Padgett
I forgot my other point, but you got me thinking of something really interesting there.
- [70:25]
Rudyard Lynch
I'll give you 20 seconds to think of it.
- [70:28]
Austin Padgett
Oh, wait, Jesus.
- [70:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Awkward on purpose.
- [70:32]
Austin Padgett
You got me.
- [70:34]
Rudyard Lynch
I love dinosaurs. I am the Elk Lord. Gotta throw in the millennial humor. Okay, your time's up.
- [70:43]
Austin Padgett
Oh, okay. So the Sunnis, when? Yeah, I forgot it. I'll think of it again. Your timer made me mad, it made me competitive. I, I said I had it to give myself three more seconds.
- [70:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Don't worry about it. You can bring it up later. In the next hour or so we're going to talk. So I'm going to go through Islam's intellectual trajectory where first you saw the synthesis with the Prophet Muhammad which spread out, which gradually became the hadiths, when the identity of the Arabs stopped being these distinct tribes that were parked in these conquered nations and had to spread out because you had to use the hadiths as a way of codifying a new civilizational structure that wasn't just the Arab tribes. And Arabs became divided between these merchant cultivated town dwellers and the desert tribes. Where in Morocco as an example, the Berbers are the. There's both Berber and Arab desert tribes. The Arabs have gradually grown as the desert tribes. The Berbers are the mountain farmer, hill people. And then the Arabs were the town dwellers and the merchants. In Morocco. Spain had a very similar dynamic where it's comparable to Bosnia where in Bosnia the people converted to the Turkish Empire. In Islam were the town dwellers and the most rural people. Because it was either you're a barbarian when Islam shows up so you don't have a pre established operating system, or you're one of the high up people in the Ottoman Empire who's dependent on the central structure, but your first Step is the codification of the hadiths, which occurred over time. And this was the efflorescence of Islamic science and art. And I can't keep track of all of these, so I'm going to read out important Islamic thinkers. So one was Al Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra. And he was the guy who brought over the Arab Alphabet over from India, because the Arab numerals we use, as opposed to the Roman one, are initially of Indian origin, which the Arabs used. And Al Khwarizmi, he was from Khorasan, which was the area of Central Asia that was ethnically Persian. Persian that was one of the wealthiest places on Earth. It was at one point the highest concentration of intellectuals on Earth. Al Razi was a Persian physician and polymath who wrote the first systematic medical encyclopedia, distinguished measles from smallpox and pioneered clinical trials. He was a skeptical rationalist who critiqued religion openly. Al Farabi, and I was thinking about him lately. Between Al Farabi, Al Farabi to Ibn Arabi, I believe, is a full trajectory of Islamic medieval thought. Where he was the guy who integrated Aristotle into Islam, where he was the Islamic Thomas Aquinas who created a central circuit board, where Aquinas got the Greek logical structure into the biblical thing, into the biblical logic structure to make a coherent universal theory of Western civilization. And that's what Al Farabi did as well. Where after him, Aristotle and Plato became highly parts of the Islamic tradition, which lasted until for the rest of Islamic history, where educated Arabs were educated Muslims were totally expected to know Aristotle and Plato. And certain regimes weighed one of them more so than the others. So under the materialists like the Abbasids were more Aristotle focused. And then when the theocrats won, they used Aristotle's consistent internal logic to mediate Islamic theology and the Hadiths. Plato was popular among the Islamic mystics who gained dominance in the medieval period and the modern Islamic Khomeini state. They're ideologically one of the strangest ever. They're a mix of Platonic philosophy, Gnosticism and. Gnosticism and Mazdakism were huge currents in the Islamic world combined with sort of shit liberty. Avicenna was a Persian polymath who wrote the dominant canon of medicine. He was into Aristotle and Neoplatonism, I believe he was Spanish and a huge guy introduced. He was one of the thinkers the European people in the high Middle Ages pulled from from because Europe got a lot of its technology and its knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans as well as the Arabic science from Muslim Spain, more so Than even people talk about the Crusades being a source of European knowledge from the classics and the Orient. But it was Muslim Spain first, followed by the Byzantines with the Crusades as number three. Al Buruni was a Central Asian polymath who measured the earth's circumference accurately, wrote anthropology on India as well as geology and comparative religion. Ibn Al Haytham was an Iraqi physicist who invented optics as a science, critiqued Ptolemy and birthed modern experimental physics. Al Ghazali was a Persian theologian, philosopher whose incoherence of philosophers. Where we're going to talk about him later because he's one of the most important figures in Islamic history where he used rationality to argue why Islam was superior, indirectly killing the entire field of philosophy. Averroes, was he, was he the figure who was Saladin's physician? Because I believe he was Egyptian and he defended Aristotle against Al Ghazali in the 12th century because there was a period when Al Ghazali wrote the theological argument against philosophy. But the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate created a decentralization of courts with the decentralization of power, many of which paid for philosophy and science. So it wasn't a radical death. The full death of philosophy only came in in the late Middle Ages. We'll talk about Ibn Arabi later and we'll talk about Ibn Khaldun later.
- [77:11]
Austin Padgett
Why would I. I remembered what I was going to say sort of earlier, but you mentioned how the Islamic elites towards the end kind of went pantheist. They were focused on their modern materialist degeneracy. Yeah, whatever all that was. And so then modern liberals will point to Islam and say, look, look at how they were. They were really good because they extolled all these values that we relate to when in reality those. That was actually the reason that medieval Islam failed.
- [77:48]
Rudyard Lynch
That's such a good point. Thank you.
- [77:51]
Austin Padgett
I knew it was worth maybe 30 seconds.
- [77:54]
Rudyard Lynch
It definitely fits. It's. I find that the more I learn about life, the more it feels like God is laughing at us.
- [78:02]
Austin Padgett
Totally. The funniest thing is the most likely theory.
- [78:06]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And so when you look at the Islamic trajectory, you saw the Mutazila free thinkers and I think they had the kernels of Islam continuing as a civilization that was growing with a trajectory comparable to west. The west where in a world where the mutazilas with the business sponsored elites, they were backed if they had been able to sort of entrench their power in a way that was sustainable and not degenerate and then also Convince the peasantry. The peasantry were attached to how the Middle East's dominant elite and social structure going back thousands of years were theocracy due to the irrigation structure. Because the irrigation systems of a lot of the Middle east demand a radical centralization of authority into a single governance to maintain the canals. And the only way to make that socially fair is to sanction the government through God. So that's why the Middle east is consistently divided between these irrigation theocracies that sort of devolve into NPC states. And I'll explain why that's justified later. And it's not me being mean. And then the latter being these barbarian peoples from the deserts or the mountains or the fringe who keep conquering them. And the Muslims could never break out of this dichotomy. But if you had seen these sort of these, these hermetic forces, as I'll call them, of business science, if they have been able to sustain themselves, themselves in the Muslim world, it is completely possible that Islam could have been a competitor to Western civilization. But they lost out due to Al Ghazali. There's this whole debate among Islamic scholars about how historically important Al Ghazali was. And I have intelligent Muslim friends who disagree with me on this. But having read a few books on the topic, Al Ghazali was the turning point. He was the guy. And having read about his life, he seems like a profoundly admirable figure. He was arguing for his society's survival. He faced a lot of depredations. Every source on him says he's the most noble man and he did all these great things. But he killed the philosophic scientific tradition in Islam, although it took a few extra centuries. He was the historic turning point. And then Al Ghazali was a mystic, as were many of the thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age, which is something that I only realized through reading Richeya Eliadeh. And there is a significant amount of debate about this inside the Muslim world. But many of the great thinkers of the Muslim world were mystics who were pulling from these Neoplatonist or Hermetic or whatever ideas. And that current picked up because Al Ghazali's argument is correct. If you take the starting point, the Abrahamics do, that the word of God in their holy books is superior to study of the external world, where Al Ghazali said all of rationality is implicit on these sort of logical assumptions that could not be true because God says so. I disagree with the thesis because my fundamental first value is Studying the world and adapting, but from the philosophic trajectory they were in, that was the correct conclusion. And Al Ghazali, using the philosopher's own language because he had studied philosophy as much as anyone, basically pulled their shit test of what you are doing is not permissible in an Islamic society. Which was what it was, an argument that people knew you could pull, but no one had. And so he basically pulled the cold water on the entire multi century period leading up to it. Both the commoners and the invading barbarians loved Al Ghazali's philosophy and he wasn't able to fully win over the course of his life, but in the generations after he did.
- [82:07]
Austin Padgett
So he said the thing that you weren't supposed to say, which unraveled the hypocrisy of the system. So it could be. And he's remembered well because they went on the dark timeline. It's kind of like we were talking about the dichotomy. In 200 years, Hitler will either be a hero or failure and a tyrant. And within the dark timeline, he might be more likely to be considered a hero because it maybe you could even say because it addressed the failures of the current system in a way that prevented that collapse. But yeah, without actually entering a positive timeline. So then that gets back to the question of can Islam work with modernity? What could those leaders have gone to not go in a pantheistic path and then leave themselves open to somebody having to shut it down even if they didn't have good ideas themselves?
- [83:07]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm sorry, man. Me doing this video is the equivalent of looking at a hundred strewn Legos across a board and I somehow have to connect all of them. I do not. I can't get into that now.
- [83:20]
Austin Padgett
Oh, you know, I don't think that's the question you can necessarily answer, but I'm just, I'm doing the same thing with the Legos of this video.
- [83:27]
Rudyard Lynch
I do want to say what I am doing here is staggeringly difficult. And I want to say that because there's not really a standard narrative on this topic where I've read, I think 15 books on this era directly or indirectly. And so I have to connect the pieces myself between. This is an author on the Maghreb, this is an author who covers world civilization to make a few remarks about Islam here. And there's not. Historians barely cover this topic. And so I don't know if you guys want to learn this.
- [83:58]
Austin Padgett
Where else you'd go was Al Ghazali Shia. I know I said that ridiculously Sunni. Oh, interesting. He was okay.
- [84:07]
Rudyard Lynch
And so Al Ghazali is a sort of dark figure, or he's a morally complicated figure where I would put him in the top five figures. Who has caused the most damage to the trajectory of world history, where, because he was the tipping point where Islam turned. And if Islam had gone on the West's trajectory, that's an event equivalent to communism never happening. Where if communism never happens, this entire area of the world or greater the former Mongol Empire is radically better. China under the Kuomintang would be as wealthy as Korea or Japan. Russia could have been a dynamic civilization that was a First World society. Communism tempered that whole region of the world. And Islam was sort of a double whammy. Where earlier Islam saw the potential to be the greatest civilization in the world, which it was for a few centuries, then Al Ghazali toppled that trajectory where they would have still had the barbarian invasions and the degeneracy. But enough of philosophizing, as the Arabs called it, philosophy would have survived that they might have forced them to introspect and develop something like the European Renaissance. But Al Ghazali made the structure much like Marx did, where there were all of these leftist clubs in west and Central Europe that were percolating before Marx, but Marx gave them the structure that they could basically shove in and take it to another level. That's what Al Ghazali did in the Middle East. But everything I've read about Al Ghazali so suggests that he was a deeply noble man and that he was doing this because he thought his society was going to die. And he was using arguments that were rationally consistent in the frame he's in. And from his perspective, I could see he is perceiving this as this is the only way the Muslim world will survive. Otherwise we will collapse into total degeneracy. The Zoroastrians are going to make a comeback. The Byzantines will take Syria, the Arabs, the barbarians will drive us back into degeneracy. And so when you look at figures like that, you have to sort of understand where they were at. And I don't want to remove the Muslim world's agency that this figure a thousand years ago propelled their trajectory. Because if you're not able to learn over a thousand years, that's less that figure and it's more the civilization's choices.
- [86:42]
Austin Padgett
Right. He pushed it in a default option. And whether they could have gone another direction depends on questions that are hard to answer.
- [86:51]
Rudyard Lynch
As we were discussing Al Ghazali was the 12th, it was the 11th century. And through the 12th century into the 13th, the Muslim world still had science and art and philosophy in a higher civilization. So by the time of the third Crusade, the Muslims were still more advanced than the Franks, but the gap was closing quickly. Late 12th century Muslims had some edge. By the end of the 13th century, Western Europe had surpassed the Muslim world in almost any metric, whether economic, technological, political, social and even. And then even Arabi was an important figure because he was the guy who categorized the new mystic derived order philosophically using Neoplatonic origins. And so in the same way that the rationalists dominated the earlier period under the Abbasids, the mystics did the high Middle ages. And this was at the same time as a series of horrifying barbarian invasions of the Muslim world. And this mystic dominated period was based out of Persia, who had a series of their own distinct mystic tradition traditions. And the issue with mystics by and large is they're sort of, they're sort of delusional and feminine in not good ways. Where you should not give mystics social authority, they're breaking because they're often sort of detached from the realities. And so when Islamic thought became highly mystic, you did have centuries of creativity, including the artistic golden age of the 14th century and the. And Rumi was an example of that. Where Rumi was a write love poetry and love poetry and that stuff which led to courtly love in Europe stem from the Muslims, where the Muslims would have these mystical experiences of love that stem from the Hermetica or these various traditions of trying to increase masculine or feminine charge as much as possible, mix them together to have the ecstasy of union. And this is what Rumi was about, where he was a mystic and a lover. And this was a descendant of the more advanced mystic culture of a little bit earlier, which you can see in things like the assassins of Alamo. And there were other organizations like this where the assassins of Alamout they were this, I believe Shia Ismael, this is melee Shia group, where this advanced sage took a mountain in northern Iran in their temperate rainforest, started kidnapping guys, putting them in a garden with beautiful women, saying he was a sorcerer who could send them to paradise and making them part of his cult. And then they would assassinate people. And they became one of the great power brokers of that entire region because they were such good assassins. And their idea was creating sort of the Ubermensch where they would do these mystic things to increase their abilities, to make them more sort of divine. And then they would use These increased abilities on their opponents, where they were a terror of their entire region. And there's a story of them with Saladin, where Saladin crossed them. And he was the most powerful Muslim ruler of the time, holding Syria and Egypt. And they went into his room and stuck a knife next to his pillow. And when he woke up, he saw it. And they were saying, we could kill you, but we chose not to. And if they can do that to Saladin, they did that to so many other people. And when the Mongol showed up in the region, and this was an example of Islamic hubris that you keep seeing with them dealing with the Mongols.
- [90:47]
Austin Padgett
The.
- [90:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Assassins challenged the Mongols, and the Mongols just killed all of them and destroyed them and butchering all of Alamut. But they were part of a broader current where Sufism was really big. And Sufism is the Islamic mystic tradition. It was very instrumental in several periods of Islamic history, with Sufis being the greatest scout scholars. And a lot of the modern sort of Islamic autism at the hadiths is these Sufis making the Sufis making these spiritual teachings, trying to convey it to the public. But in the process of trying to convey their highly rich, mystic experiences, it just gets highly minute and obsessive. And so the Sufis gradually translated into the Islamic legalism that ended up dominating in the early modern period under governments like the Ottomans. And the Safavids are interesting where they were part of this Shia Sufi messianic religious cult, and they're the dominant ruling family and regime of Iran for centuries. Then they had to bureaucratize it as well. And the Safavids are. They're historically interesting because they came in with the rubble after Tamerlane and the Mongols had destroyed the region, and they took over Iran, converted it from 90% Sunni to 90% Shia, and Iran has been Shia ever since. And I'll talk about their leader later in sort of the context of the archetype of the sensitive young man warlord, which you see popping up again and again in this era of history. And he was a brutal barbarian, but also cultivated. And they saw Iran's decline as opium and abortion was super normalized. So because these barbarian Turkic peoples, where their leader was an ethnic Turk from Azerbaijan with some Greek and other ancestry, he sees control of the decaying Persian civilization. And they created sort of restrictive economic rules with these Turkic noblemen, these Turkic barbarians on top of the local population predating. And then they used abortion in strict religious structures and opium, because drunkenness was forbidden in Islam, but opium was okay under a certain clause to sort of keep Iran, this formerly great people, in a stagnant position over the early modern period.
- [93:29]
Austin Padgett
So is the stereotype of the incense den, belly dancing, Ottoman court jezebel connected to like mysticism? Yes, it's like the mystery of like, I feel like there's even mystery themed advertising with that kind of like, like lingerie lines or something like that.
- [93:56]
Rudyard Lynch
The Sufis were important for the Ottomans because the Sufis were the big people who did the conversions in high to late medieval Islam. They're corresponding very closely to the Franciscans in Western Europe at the same time. And so the Sufis converted the Turkish barbarians who were originally pagans both in Central Asia and in Anatolia. So the Ottomans had a close relationship with the Sufis due to that. The Sufis also converted the black tribes in Africa as well as a lot of Pakistan. So they were the vanguard of Islam because they would often live in poverty and they had magical powers. And they would use the magical powers to impress peoples, to show their power. And so once the Turks conquered Anatolia, it was the Sufis who converted the local Greek speaking population from Christian to Muslim Turks.
- [94:54]
Austin Padgett
Interesting. So I may have just been thinking Victoria's Secret was mysterious. A secret mystery. Go ahead.
- [95:04]
Rudyard Lynch
So we covered Islam's intellectual trajectory and the sort of broader philosophic trajectory. Keep in mind that the sort of Sunni orthodoxy and the crystallization of the Shia orthodoxy was the norm by the time of European colonialism. So the modern radical Islamist bent is a modern thing where the founder of the religious school that Saudi Arabia and the Taliban and Isis indirectly were dependent on Wahhabism, the founder of that lived at the same time as the American Revolution and as late as the 20th century I was reading this, these two primary sources of French, of French thinkers in North Africa, where the French have one of the best historiographies on the Arabs. I think of anyone because they had to conquer the Maghreb and the Maghreb, by the way, it's the land of the setting sun. In Arabic, it's Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. The forms a distinct polarity. And these French authors would just say the Arabs are degenerates and homosexuals. And that stuff where one of them said, we like the Berbers because the Berbers are men and the Arabs are homosexuals and they engage in sexual degeneracy and they, they don't hold their word and they're not masculine because colonial era France was this hyper masculine society which is something that we like.
- [96:31]
Austin Padgett
The noble, noble savagery of the Berbers.
- [96:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [96:34]
Austin Padgett
In that same way that you admire nomads versus Urban. Yeah, weak societies.
- [96:39]
Rudyard Lynch
And so the decadent Islamic stereotype survived into the 20th century and this anti European return to the Prophet Muhammad often against the Hadiths and the building up of the Islamic bureaucracy that starts in the 18th century and then in the early 20th century the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood it gets more popularized and then really in the late 20th century was when it cascaded across the Muslim Muslim world partly due to Saudi money, partly due to the threat of global communism. So when you're looking at the radical Islam of today, that's a end part of their trajectory where they kept on making the decision to double down on their rejection of the, of the Abbasids.
- [97:26]
Austin Padgett
Does Wahhabism flow through Sunni and Shia?
- [97:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Wahhabism is radical Sunni, radical Sunni specifically.
- [97:35]
Austin Padgett
And, and then is this attitude also pervasive within Shia sex or does it like can you break it down cleanly? I mean typically Iran is associated with terrorism, but they're Shia so they shouldn't be lining up with us.
- [97:54]
Rudyard Lynch
It hit both the Sunnis and the Shias at this in the same time in roughly the same ways. So the Persians pull more so from the Shia 12 or traditional. And you can see that in Sudan against the British with the Mahdi you can see that as a consistent thread in Shia history. And the Shias are very dependent on Platonism and Gnosticism. Theologically for the Sunnis it's more so reflecting back the values of their ulamas and so both of the Islamic world in general. Its knee jerk reaction to European colonialism was we need to revert back to the Prophet Muhammad.
- [98:36]
Austin Padgett
Right. Because you can't, if you can't win at their game then you play a different game. It's like they went into moral hierarchy when they couldn't win the physical or material hierarchy.
- [98:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, that's, that's, that's true. And it shows the transition from a western to an eastern civilization because India had the exact same reaction to European colonialism as did China for the first few centuries of we need to revert back to our traditions more. And I think part of that is that power shifted, at least social power because there was always the nomads on top, especially later on from the Arabs and the Persians who are more of these individualistic nomadic peoples who have the sort of similar to European like traits as well as the Greeks and the Semites and the Christians of course to these valley dwelling peoples who are more eastern. And so even inside the Middle East, Iraqis and Egyptians have more sort of Eastern psychologies, while the Lebanese or the Turks, the Somalis and the Arabs have the. They're hyper collectivist, but they also do have the warrior, I don't trust authority bent to them. And so you have to see the Middle east as a microcosm of distinct cultures where Islam is so important, because Islam is the sole thing that transcends all of these identities. And even inside Turkey, anthropologically, different populations of Turk have differing levels of individualism and Western psychological traits than other groups of Turks. The Western Turks and also the herding Turks up in the mountains are more psychologically Western, while the farmer peoples are more psychologically Eastern.
- [100:19]
Austin Padgett
Oh yeah, the people in the west are speaking French. They live in cities. The people in the east is basically like Syria. It's like a desert. Some of them are like in Cappadocia. They're people who have lived there for 10,000 years.
- [100:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Another, another element here is that a lot of the Muslim elite for this time period were ethnically European. Where I wrote an essay about the demographics of Umayyad Spain. And it's interesting where Umayyad Spain, which was the other Arab state with the fall of the Abbasids we haven't spoken about. They were the breakaway of the Abbasid takeover of the Umayyads, where the Abbasid seized power as part of this Persian nationalist Shia movement. The Umayyad prince fled to Spain, installed himself as caliph of Spain and built out Spain to be a distinct polarity of Islamic civilization that was competitive with the main areas in Asia or Egypt. And later on, as the Abbasids fell, became the heartland of Islamic civilization. Where Spain was one of the most fertile and populous places in the Muslim world. And the European governments and the Spanish governments would flee to Spain in the same way Third World governments flee to first World governments because they were that much more advanced in West European authors of that time period would fake having Arabic names to make themselves more prestigious. And the creation of the unified Arab world created a revolution in agriculture, in mechanics, in science, in a litany of fields. And so Spain really shone very brightly. And they had nearly the entire peninsula under the Umayyads. But in my research on the ethnography of Muslim Spain in 1000 AD, it was mostly ethnic Iberians who were gradually converted to Islam from Roman Catholic church over the 11th century before the the Spaniards took them out and reconquered it. You had a significant Basque population, more than today in the north. The north Spanish had not yet formed their ethnic identities. You had a significant French settler population across the north of Spain. You had Berbers from North Africa who were the vanguard who conquered Spain, Spain. And they were most populous along the frontier region between them and them and the Christians, where I've been thinking a lot for the last few months, of the Banu Qasi, who are very interesting because they were one of the Arabic peoples of which there were many who migrated out. The Arabs especially moved to North Africa and out to the Central Asian frontier, Iran. Those areas had large Arabic populations which intermixed and spread their culture. But the Banu Qasi were this Arab people who migrated from Arabia to Libya through the Maghreb, then Spain, ending up around Barcelona as a noble ruling family against the Christians. And the Berbers did a lot of that stuff, settling along the frontier. There were about 10% of Spain's population. You had a small Arab elite who were either these armies where a Syrian army was sent by the Arabs to conquer the Umayyads. And they just turned over to the Umayyads, becoming one of their best allies, which was a consistent thread in Arab history because of the low social trust due to the clan structure. And you had this Arab elite. But by the time of the 11th century they were majority European ancestry because that was their favorite place to pick sex slaves from, because the noblemen would have harems, of course, and they preferred Europeans. They preferred Eastern Europeans especially. But in Spain they were picking Dutch and French women. So by the time you get to Al Mansour, the great Umayyad commander who burnt the major Spanish city at Santiago de Compostella, which was a great Christian site, he was over 80% North European ancestry and he had red hair because they had interbred with Europeans so much. Or they showed images of the Ottoman ruling family today and they look like they're white Americans.
- [104:42]
Austin Padgett
And so I wonder if that fashion started in the Crusades too, because I know there are a lot of European genes in Syria from that era.
- [104:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Like Richard Hanania, who's. Who's a 11 time Christian and he's 10 French and German ancestry.
- [104:55]
Austin Padgett
He looks like the Afghan girl on the National Geographic documentary with like the weird color eyes, like Eurasian kind of. He doesn't look Eurasian at all, but he looks as mixed up as a Eurasian.
- [105:08]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I'm refraining from a lengthy rant about it because it would consume half an hour, but this is definitely funny looking. Highly ethnically diverse region and the. So no, it predates the Christians. It goes back centuries. They've preferred Europeans until the Islamic golden age. And a big reason the Vikings traded with the Muslim world in Byzantium was the Vikings were selling Slavic girls to their nobility.
- [105:37]
Austin Padgett
Right, right.
- [105:39]
Rudyard Lynch
So highly diverse world, lots of complicated dynamics. Spain is a sort of microcosm. And now that we get into the decline, we talked a little bit about the Abbasids, where power sort of gradually decentralized until it was a joke and there was no centralizing authority. And this was difficult for Islam because they had built an identity about being dar al Islam, or the House of Islam, as this centralized, cohesive family which would go against the House of War, which was everyone else. And further west, you saw the Umayyads maintain power in Spain longer until the early 11th century, but they had the consistent pattern of Islamic over compensation. We talk about where they actually built out a complex bureaucracy to control the various Arab and Berber tribal commanders they were dependent on to maintain their power. And the bureaucracy became a force in its own right, as always happened. Started eating them. They couldn't maintain their costs. And so the Umayyads fell apart into these local private Islamic states called the Taifas. And Taifa is sort of principality in Arabic. And this created a void that the Christians could use to enter the region where the Christians who had survived in the north as sort of barbarians, they were able to push the Muslims back south. And by the mid to late 11th century, they had defeated the Muslims that were left at Toledo, the former capital. They had seized more than half of Spain, starting up in the northern mountains with the kingdoms like Castile and Leon in Portugal, will develop later, Navarre, Catalonia. And this was part of a process where the Christians, who the Muslims saw with utter contempt as the Farangi, they were able to turn the tide against the Muslims in the 11th century, where the Normans drove the Muslims out of Sicily, where Sicily is one of the last things the Abbasids conquered in the 9th century from the Byzantines. But Sicily then flipped over to the Aghlabids, who were a local sort of Berber family that controlled Iflachia and the Norman Vikings from the north of France. They were able to conquer the south of Italy as mercenaries, drive the Muslims out of Sicily and create a unified nation of the eastern Greek Christians, the Italian Catholics, the Jews and the Arabs, it being one of the wealthiest places in the world. And historians have widely said that this was a turning point in global history, because with the 11th century, the Mediterranean went from a Muslim lake where the Muslims had armies in France and they besieged Rome, nearly taking it, besieging Constantinople, to by the time of the Crusades, the Christians had a complete dominance over trade in the region where the Italians were trading and had exclusive contracts with Egypt, the Muslims in North Africa were dependent on Christian European mercenaries. They had conquered most of Spain back. And when the Mediterranean turned from Muslim to Christian dominated in the 11th century was when the Muslim world declined for every. Nearly every century after. And it's when the west went up.
- [109:14]
Austin Padgett
Was Spain even historically significant before it was invaded by the Muslims, like Spain before 600, 700 AD? I can't think of like what was. Did it dominate the Mediterranean back then? You know, what did it. How did it. How did it interact with the Roman Empire? I mean, it did. I'm just trying to think of, like, significant historical.
- [109:40]
Rudyard Lynch
The Spaniards were seen as sort of the best surrogate Italians where as the Roman Empire decentralized, both the Greeks in the east and the Latins in the west looked to other ethnic groups that they could use to sort of fill maintenance of the Empire. And the Latins and the book, sorry, the Balkan peoples were the ones who would rise to leadership later on. But during the peak of Roman power, I believe Trajan was a Spaniard. A lot of their leadership class were Spaniards in the south. And the east of Spain was widely seen as an extension of Italy. Same people, comparable genetics. They spoke Latin. It was similar climate. So they were one of the great. They were one of the most important areas of the Roman Empire. And it's been a consistent thread, going back to Gibbon, of comparing Rome's relationship to Spain with Spain's relationship to the New World, that the Romans came in predominantly for Spanish silver mines, made it an extractive region for them to bring stuff back to Italy, and then they gradually assimilated the region into their broader culture.
- [110:50]
Austin Padgett
Interesting. I mean, yeah, it's always kind of paralleled with Italy. I was going to say the Slavs. Selling Slavs to the Middle east is very much like how the Africans sold Africans to the Europeans along the rivers.
- [111:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Whoa, man.
- [111:04]
Austin Padgett
Another interesting little.
- [111:07]
Rudyard Lynch
It's almost like you can't bifurcate the complexity of the human condition into bimodal things like race or sex.
- [111:15]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's like literally how this works. So I'll be a little less resentful at the Muslims, but they still took a lot from the coast, those bastards.
- [111:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, the. I can't get to the Barbary Corsairs now, but the Islamic slave trade was huge, and they took over a million West Europeans to the slave markets of North Africa and the Middle East. And Muslim pirates made it out to Iceland and England in the 16th centuries and they killed over 20 million Muslims, which was more than West European Atlantic slavery ever was. They were also more brutal to the Muslims. They worked them to death, bringing them across the Sahara, where very few would survive these trans Sahara walks. It was a brutal society. And Islam was one of the few, few cultures in history that was as dependent upon slavery as it was. Because inside the clan structure, you couldn't trust people, because if you appointed someone else as a ruler, they were dependent to their clan first, not you. And you see this thread in Islamic history where of course they would use white women as concubines, they would use Africans to work in the fields, they used Turkic instead. Barbarians to. To be their military forces, and where.
- [112:35]
Austin Padgett
They use Chinese guys to do math. They're just stereotypes. They.
- [112:40]
Rudyard Lynch
They introduced paper into the Middle east through beating a Chinese army. And then the Chinese artisans taught them how to use paper. And also that's how gunpowder spread.
- [112:51]
Austin Padgett
Oh, right, through. Yeah, through the Middle East. That makes sense. And the connection to the Jade Gates.
- [112:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, silk. And silk came under the Byzantines before the Muslims, as did the compass, came through the Islamic period from China. This was the time period of the Silk Road as well, where with the fall of the Abbasid power, you saw two differentiating pressures of establishing power in the Muslim world. One of which were the Mameluke mercenaries who seized power over the Asian area. And then the second were the Berbers in Spain and North Africa who seized power in the fallen void. So when you look at the Mamelukes in the east, the Abbasids became decadent enough that they were totally dependent on these Turkic barbarians from Central Asia. And the Turks were a barbarian people originally from Mongolia that spread west. And they're similar to the Germans versus the Romans. That's a point Tamim Ansari makes, that the Arabs established this earlier civilization like the Romans, and then the Germans and the Turks were barbarians who inserted energy into it so that the system could keep going, so that Arabic Islamic civilization would survive longer than just the Arab virility. And the two first great currents of the Mamelukes were the Seljuks, who started out in what was called Turan, or the grasslands of Central Asia, north of the Islamic world. They entered Samarkand with their first great leader being Toghrul Bey, who seized control of Samarkand as military dictator, forming the Seljukli. And the Seljuqs wiped out, or the Seljuqs as they're normally called, wiped out the Samanids, who were a Persian Revanchist group that seized control of northeastern Iran with the fall of the Abbasids and governed it pretty well. And the Seljuqs helped destroy the neo Persian Renaissance that was quite big in that area of the world because that was based upon all of these sort of aesthetic traits like philosophy or literature or eroticism. The Turkic barbarians just had no interest in. The Turkic barbarians supported Al Ghazali. And the subjects are really remarkable for how much they conquered where they entered the region. And by the end of by Togrul Bey's death, they had seized Iraq, turned the Abbasids into their clients as well as Iran and Central Asia. After Toggrel Bey's son was able to take power, Alp Arslan seized the Seljuks and he beat the Byzantines at Manzikert, colonizing Anatolia, which was modern Turkey, the core of the Byzantine Empire, where they pulled most of their strength and their men from. And the battle of Manzikert is really sort of sad because the Byzantines have been going through their own renaissance that was wasted by sort of two foolish princesses who didn't maintain the military Zoe. And they burned all of their money on various palace intrigues and degeneracy. So the Turks won this battle, which the Byzantines won the first half of it. And the Turks attacked them in a cunning way to wipe out their entire force. And the Byzantines lost all of Anatolia overnight, which ultimately killed their empire, which is why we don't have a Greek state the size of Germany in modern Turkey. And the Turks were afterwards able to beat the Byzantines at the Battle of Konya, or as I call it, Konya in western Turkey. The Byzantines were initially able to seize the coastline. The Byzantines were able to drive them off the coastline. Again, same thing with the Crusaders entering the region. And the Turks were able to gradually assimilate the entirety of Anatolia into their cultural region. So now the former Greek Christian inhabitants are practically entirely gone from Anatolia. And that doesn't include the Seljuk attacks south into Syria and Levant, where they made it down to Jerusalem. So there was a period for about a generation when the entirety of the Middle east was under Seljuk Turk governance, where they had seized Jerusalem, they were on the edges of Egypt, they were besieging Constantinople. But then, like all of the nomad confederacies, the Turks were incapable of maintaining their authority because they were based around the charisma of singular leaders. So after Alp Arslan's death, maybe a generation after the Seljuk Empire split into all of these distinct parts where the Abbasids in Iraq were able to get a modicum of independence before the Mongols crushed them again. In a century. The Fatimids retook the Levant from Egypt. And then barbarian tribes in Azerbaijan and in Turkey split off their own identities with Turkey becoming the Sultanate of Raoul as the Turks tried to take the garb of the Roman Empire. Well, the Sultanate of Raw um is the Sultanate of Rome.
- [118:16]
Austin Padgett
It's pretty crazy that Byzantium being lost would be like if the Reconquista never happened in Spain. It's just a significant of a territory and population. And you don't think of the Levant also and its connection to like kind of more Greek culture. I guess you could say that's the only one that's changed in the last 200 years as it was reconquered by Poles and Ukrainians. If you want to make a joke about it.
- [118:43]
Rudyard Lynch
One of the things historians of civilizations comment on is you had multiple Christian civilizations in this era in the Middle east that the Muslims wiped out that had potential where the Byzantine Greeks were one, you had another Nestorian Christian civilization that spread from Syria to China that was hugging the Silk Road. And then you had others like the Aramean culture which spread across the Fertile Crescent. That was a Christian society that the Arabs sort of co opted because the Aramean Christians were pushing up against the dominant Byzantines and they opened the gates to to the Arabs. But this entire region experienced a cultural compression after the Black Death where this insane amount of diversity was crushed under conformity. The other great first round of the Mameluke states was with the Ghaznavid Turks. And they were another Turkic people, similar to the Seljuks who started in Central Asia, went to Afghanistan, raised an army there, which is pretty consistent thread. And they were the first Muslims to invade India, where they got as far as Delhi and they formed the Ghaznavid ruling family that controlled the area from Central Asia down through India, because the Arabs earlier had stopped at the Indus river. So they took Pakistan, but not modern India. And the Ghaznavids were the first group of Muslims to invade India. But after they grew decadent, the Delhi Sultanate, who were more pure Mamelukes, seized control of India, where the Delhi Sultanate was a remarkably oppressive regime like the other Mamluks we're going to talk about. And they formed modern Delhi because they moved the base of Islamic control from Pakistan to the Gangetic Plain in North India. And by the end of the 14th century, they had conquered nearly the entirety of India because India had grown decadent. And you'll hear stories about Indian princes building temples to the gods when the Muslims could defeat them, outnumbered 10 to 1, like the battle of Panipat, rather than improving their militaries.
- [120:54]
Austin Padgett
It sounds like they conquered India because they tried to conquer India. And that's what happens when you try to conquer India.
- [121:00]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it works. And. And we have records of Islamic authors at the time who said, we find India to be deeply degenerate and gross. We admire how wealthy their temples are. But Babur, who is one of the sensitive young men warlords will get to, he would write about, I think India's too hot. There's nothing refined here. The women aren't beautiful. I'm here because I have to, for geopolitical reasons. And the Muslims processed the Indians, as they put them in a different category from the Zoroastrians and the peoples of the book, like the Christians and the Arabs, the Christians and the Jews, where they saw the Indians as polytheists. So they were profoundly brutal, where a lot of the periods of the Delhi Sultanate, they would take three quarters from the local Indians. We think they might have killed a lot of people. We don't know, because India didn't have the records to maintain that. But the Muslims really were not kind to India. And the thing with these Mameluke ruling classes is the Mamelukes were these slave armies that leaders would get from these barbarian peoples, and they would often live in palaces and had a lot of power. But the thing with the Mamelukes is when they eventually took power, because they were the ones with the sword, so they could displace the king. And this happened many times in Islamic history. It's remarkable they didn't pick up on the pattern. They could just utterly extort the local populations because they had no connection. And they were this cohesive military elite, much like the later political parties such as the Nazis or the Soviets. And so in both Egypt and in Northern India, you saw these highly rapacious regimes that turned both Egypt and North India from one of the wealthiest places on Earth to pretty poor, where I think a big element for why South India is wealthier than North India, with the core of India like Uttar Pradesh and the great Gangetic Plain, being very poor is due to these centuries of exploitive Muslim Mamluk ruling practices.
- [123:09]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's a weird reversion to kind of like the origin of statehood. When you have a military junta, it's like they just reduce it to its core elements, without any of the cultural or institutional norms that you have to choose to actually have something with direction.
- [123:28]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a great way of putting it. And that's something Francis Fukayama speaks to at the origin of Islamic statehood. Because the Muslims have continually faced this issue, and you can see all of Islamic history as the attempt to get around it, where they have an issue with state formation, which they either solve through religious fundamentalism or through trying to create these macro tribe identities. If it's an ethnicity like the Turks, they have enough ethnic coherence, they can form a Turkic national identity, same thing as the Persians. And then you have the Mamluks, where all of these are attempts to do state formation in the Muslim world. Because the Muslims never had national societies form in the same way that they did in Europe. There was not right.
- [124:17]
Austin Padgett
Certainly not around the actual ethnicities. The nations didn't form like in Europe, at least formed more around the ethnicities like the French and the Italians. Yeah. Et cetera.
- [124:27]
Rudyard Lynch
And a big element of this, which we'll see with Ibn Khaldun, is there was not enough coherency of government in the Muslim world. And what I mean by that is that in the Kingdom of France, it's the same ruled regime forever. And that was partly because Western Europe had its own nobility and a warrior nobility that could maintain power consistently, and they were able to maintain enough virility to maintain independence. In the Muslim world, you either have the town dwellers who. Who devolve into basically degeneracy and conformity, and then you have the savage barbarians. Savage barbarians conquered the town dwellers, lured their power over them, which in the process destroyed capitalism and the high trust. And the town dwellers just stay degenerate and the barbarians degenerate with the town dwellers, where you don't have the European concept of this nobility that maintains excellence on a generational basis to protect the society. So you either have these nomads or these religious leaders who can seize power, but the society itself doesn't actually have the social capital to maintain this. And when I was reading. And this is the Ibn Khaldun cycle that sped up with India, because in India, these effects of decadence are supercharged due to the alien culture and the tropical climate, which means they're alienated from their homelands in Central Asia and Afghanistan in an alien society which was easy to conquer. So India has the dynamics you see in the rest of the Muslim world, but it's supercharged.
- [126:06]
Austin Padgett
Reverse colonialism. An example of reverse colonialism.
- [126:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [126:09]
Austin Padgett
The practices they learned to keep down the colonies in India were later employed in the rest of the Muslim world.
- [126:17]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't know if that's true. It's probably true. But what I will say is that India exacerbates the dynamic because you have a larger, more decadent population of conquered town dwellers versus a more savage, more cohesive group of barbarians from Afghanistan and Central Asia. So it's the same demographic, but more.
- [126:42]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And then the power that that group gets from lording over India will translate into the rest of the power dynamics in the Middle East.
- [126:50]
Rudyard Lynch
And the most interesting, the Muslim world was very much connected, especially by the Hajj or the ritual trip to Mecca. And so Islamic people in India would talk to Egypt, would talk to the Maghreb. And you had an archetype of these wandering travel traveler figures like Ibn Fadlan. And there was another one where they would go across the entire world. So you had Islamic travelers who went to China, into York and down into sub Saharan Africa and India. So you had these world traveler people that were pretty common. And to get through more of the political dynamics, the, the Berbers had several very interesting political alignments. Where the first were the Fatimids, who formed in the 9th century in Tunisia as part of a ship Shia religious group. And they first started in the Maghreb and conquered Egypt, making it their dominant base. And they lost control of the Maghreb to other more disagreeable Berbers. And the Berbers keep doing this because they were mountain and desert peoples who didn't lose their edge like the town dwellers. So the Fatimids seized control of Egypt for a few centuries. They loosened up on their religious fundamentalism and Egypt became one of the most wealthy and important areas of the Muslim world. Although the Fatimids did engage in some low trust strategies where they weren't perfect. They were fairly corrupt. They treated the local Egyptians sometimes like crap. Where the town dwelling valley peoples of the Middle east, they did not have independence for any of this. They did not have independence from the period of the pharaohs or Nebuchadnezzar until the end of European colonialism. So that it was whatever other conquering people happened to be in charge of Egypt or Iraq. But things would get a lot worse after the Fatimids. And Egypt was still the center of global trade and all these distinct things. But after the Fatimids had moved their base of operations from Iflaqiya to Egypt, the next great Berber group were the Almoravids, and they're the Sanhaja Berbers. And you Have, I believe the Tuareg are the Sanhaja. And they're the inhabitants of the Sahara Desert where they are fully veiled. And Sanhaja is a term for veiled. And so in the heat of the desert, because they're the central people who connect sub Saharan Africa to the Maghreb, the sort of desert wanderer people, almost like a Star Trek civilization, a star, a Star wars desert, Tatooine society.
- [129:31]
Austin Padgett
They.
- [129:34]
Rudyard Lynch
They started following this wandering religious scholar from Arabia who said they were all degenerates, where he saw a woman who was not wearing a veil. And this caused him to have an identity crisis where he said, how dare these women not wear veils. You guys are such degenerates. And they said, wait, you are truly a wise man.
- [129:51]
Austin Padgett
Because the men were all started.
- [129:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, because the men were veiled and the women were not. This started and then he became their respected religious figure. And this caused a trajectory where the Sanhaja Desert Berbers formed the most powerful political formation in that area, called the Almoravids, where their leader was born in modern Mali, on the other side of the Sahara. And the Almoravids are impressive because they would conquer into subsequent Saharan Africa and then they would also get up into Spain. And they were religious fundamentalists who pushed against the degeneracy of the coastal areas of the Maghreb. And they seized the entire region, from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, down to Mali. And then they invaded Spain, because Spain had fallen into these Taifa states that were these local Muslim principalities. And the Almoravids conquered all of these under the pretext that the Christians seize Toledo. And this is when El Cid is set, because El Cid was a Spanish knight who was a Christian, who was the guy who organized the defense against the Almoravids. So they didn't take Zaragoza. And he built a coalition of all the anti Almoravid forces to make sure that the Almoravids could not conquer the Christians. But the Almoravids, like everyone else, followed Ibn Khaldun's cycle, where Ibn Khaldun was a Moroccan, so he was following these things. And he said that each of These dynasties lasted 120 years, which was the time between the original former of the dynasty and then their degeneracy after four generations, because they lost their initial barbarian vigor. So the Stahja Almoravids had a lot of vigor because they were fundamentalists and from the middle of the desert. But they ultimately grew decadent and they were replaced by the Almohads who also followed the wise men, Ibn Tummart, who said they were all degenerates, and rallied the former peoples of the Atlas Mountains to launch a revolt against the Almoravids, which ultimately worked. And the Almohads became new lords of this region, and they governed it until the early 13th century, where they had two defeats. One was against the Christians in 1221 at Las Navas de Tolosa, which meant the Christians reconquered almost all of Spain, except for the county of Granada at the bottom of Spain, which they maintained for another 200 years and after. So when people say the reconquista ended in 1492, that was the defeat of Granada, which became this center of culture and epicureanism highly cultivated. But the Christians had almost all of Spain for 200 years leading up to that point. So it really ended in 1221, and with the fall of the Almohads, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia all split apart into being the distinct countries that they are today. And that region of the Maghreb became dominated by people called the Barbary Corsairs, where as the region decayed, as the region decayed, it became dependent on stealing from the Europeans to maintain their economy. So the Barbary Corsairs were pirates. And this was the tipping point when Islam lost out to Western civilization. And the Barbary Corsairs, they would raid the Mediterranean shores of Europe the most. They would get as far north as France or England or Iceland, as said before. And they were ultimately destroyed by the Americans in the early 19th century. But the Maghreb shore was seen as this sort of exotic pirate layer for the entire early modern period, when another.
- [133:53]
Austin Padgett
Civ is so much powerful that the easiest way for your civ to make money is to rob some of their ships instead of starting a business. That's how you know you've truly lost.
- [134:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly.
- [134:05]
Austin Padgett
Like, you're so far behind, it's easier for you to rob the store than, like, to start a business. It's just hilarious that the European. The Americans got rid of them. It's like, did the Europeans just kind of get used to it and forgot about it when we were like, wait a minute, why are we doing this?
- [134:21]
Rudyard Lynch
So the Americans did it because we were, as a new country, trading with the Mediterranean, and the Barbary Corsairs were attacking our traffic. And all of the Europeans had pre established these agreements to pay off the Barbary Corsairs, not attack them. And they hadn't really thought about the growing power differential due to growing technology, because they had these pre established deals and the Americans just thought this was super gay. So they sent a few ships out, hired mercenaries and then attacked Tripoli and Tunis and Algiers, knocking out the Barbary Corsairs with a handful of American guys working with local mercenaries.
- [134:57]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it wasn't even that hard. It was like one ship. I think the USS Liberty did most of the damage. It's like when a little dog is born first and then they get like a big dog and the big dog is afraid of it forever. And then you walk in, you're like, what are you doing, you idiot? Just take them out. Now that they were afraid, it was more like slipping into a comfortable habit of negotiated ransom, but exactly similar dynamic. So you're telling me that the, the Hajib originated from the Berber headdress that was used to basically cross the Sahara that just had the eye opening and that those same people, the Berbers taking over Morocco and, and Spain is what gave El Cid so many of his, his Muslim allies as part of the Reconquista. The Muslims that were against the, the head band guys.
- [135:55]
Rudyard Lynch
The hijab has been a consistent threat in that area of the world for a while. And it stems from when we're in Texas, which is the climate. Austin is at the latitude of Cairo. And there's two ways to deal with this sort of heat. Either you have basically wearing as little possible or nudity, which you see with the Egyptians or the Greeks or the Indians, where in traditional Indian culture being topless is a sign of high social class.
- [136:25]
Austin Padgett
And they live in the Philippines. Everywhere they lift their shirt over their stomach and let their stomach hang out. It's really funny.
- [136:34]
Rudyard Lynch
And then the other is to wear robes like this because it allows the air to flow. And a robe like this is actually pretty comfortable in Texas's climate because the air is ventilated in your system. And so the Arabs were doing the other side of this of we're going to cover up and ventilate it. And so the hijab is a sort of attitude of if it's going to be hot all the time, I'm going to block out my skin. And so the sun can't hit me. But they're over correcting because they're wearing black in a really hot climate, which soaks up the heat. But that was a transition over the late medieval period. And yes, the Sid did get his Muslim allies from pushing against these Berber invaders.
- [137:12]
Austin Padgett
Right? Yeah, because I, I mean I remember the bad guy from the movie, but said all the motions, the actions in Motion. The, like the guys that wore all black and they had the turbines and they were mean looking and they took over the colorful. Yeah, Muslims. And.
- [137:29]
Rudyard Lynch
To go through the decline phase, I'm going to start with Ibn Khaldun, who's an interesting figure. He's the greatest Islamic historian, although he was not recognized in the Muslim world for centuries after. He was a nobleman from Morocco and he built the, he wrote the Muqadima, which was his book on his guide to world history, which I've read. It's, it's very good. And he was involved in Maghrebi politics of his era. He had a very difficult life where both of his parents died of the Black Death. He was forced to travel around his faction was kicked out of power multiple times. He lived in destitution. He was friends with Tamerlane, where they met up in Syria. And when you read about the criticisms of Imin Khaldun at the time, people say he associates with beautiful women too much, he's too well dressed, he comes across as edgy. And I thought none of these are real criticisms. They're all social.
- [138:32]
Austin Padgett
You're mogging too much.
- [138:33]
Rudyard Lynch
And I asked Grok about this and Grok said the issue Ibn Khaldun faced is he called out the decline in the middle of it, where a society in decline uses this social BS to police people. And then a society on the rise doesn't care because its ultimate reason that it's pushing is sort of this central direction. And so they were attacking Ibn Khaldun for these silly social things because what he was saying was true, because he was chronicling the decline of the Muslim world. And from his perspective, it's this rhythmic cycle of barbarians seize power and then they grow decadent. And this was getting pretty old by the 14th century century. And Ibn Khaldun talks about other things where he has lengthy segments about the importance of property rights and the free market which the Muslim world had had before, but these new exploitive regimes did not respect those things. And so Islam was going into poverty where the Maghreb was getting poorer. And Ibn Khaldun spoke to that. And there's this sort of cynical, defeated notion that we conquered dar Islam under the Prophet Muhammad. Then we tried to find a new direction, but the new direction isn't getting us anywhere. But we can't go back either, so we don't know where we are. And it's interesting that after Ibn Khaldun wrote his narrative, the Muslim world actually got out of the issues he articulated where the Ottoman Turks were The best example where they had policies once they unified the entire Islamic Mediterranean, is they would kill off all the competitors to the royal line, except the son who was chosen. And they would also hire these Christian Janissary mercenaries they kept under tight control. So the Turks were able to break out of the 120 year cycle where they ruled from the late 14th until the early 20th centuries. But the cost was the Islamic world's dynamism, where the Turks enforced this stultifying orthodoxy, these guild structures, where the free market was nearly totally wiped out from the Muslim world, where the Mamelukes in Egypt, who followed a similar parallel to the Mamelukes elsewhere, they seized power after Saladin and they were from the Caucasus and Ukraine. And they created this orthodoxy where the second you were born, this highly rigid ruling class, where the second you were born in Egypt, you were a second class citizen. So it was always recruiting these new guys from the steppe who would exploit Egypt. And they governed Egypt from the 13th until early 13th until the 1950s. And they became protectorates under the Ottomans in the early 16th century because they couldn't adapt to gun warfare like the Ottomans could. But Egypt's population in that time period went from 10 million or 6 million at the time of the Crusades, to 2 million at the time of Napoleon. Syria and the Levant went from one of the most wealthy and populous places on earth in the 12th century at the time of the Crusades, to nearly totally depopulated when the Jews were migrating into the region in the 20th century because the Mamelukes burned down every major city in the Levant to stop the Crusaders from taking the region. And we haven't covered the Crusades because that's its own sort of, it's its own box that we already made a video about. But these crushing of the free market occurred across the entire Muslim world, where as an example, the Sultan of Yemen, who controlled the bottleneck at the mouth of the Red Sea, he established an 80% tariff on all traffic going through the region, which destroyed the Red Sea and Egypt's economy. So these, these increasingly more oppressive elites destroyed the free market and worked with the priest class to control the population.
- [142:31]
Austin Padgett
The Middle east is insane. It's like fallout because they're literally living in. Can you imagine an area having ruins after having cities like multiple times over the last 3,000 years? Like, yeah, it must be exhausting because it's not like they just built civilization once and then had ruins. It's like it's happened like a million times. Oh yeah, it's like how do you get, how do you get past this barrier? And so then when you see from the perspective of the Middle east during colonialism, where they're both highly trustful of development because they've been through this cycle where it breaks down into degeneracy every time they can't really make it work. And then they see the great power of the European countries and you said something like that made like it's the lack of confidence that makes them retreat into an appeal to morality as their highest status which you can see on an individual layer. Right. Like if an individual can't compete in the society, social hierarchy, sexual hierarchy or then they might, they often retreat to moral hierarchy, which is like a sense of moral superiority to.
- [143:45]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [143:46]
Austin Padgett
Make them on top of any hierarchy. Right. So that's the response the Middle east took. But then you see, so you can see all these pressures against it. But then you see place like Saudi Arabia today and they're starting to compete very seriously technologically, financially, even, you know, very competitive with parts of Europe or, or more competitive with parts of Europe today. And they also have a very high approval rating within the Middle east despite their relations with the US or Israel or, or whatever the West. And so you got to think that these kind of like, and this is happening pretty recently, but you got to think that the popping up of these huge cities, some of the most impressive skyscrapers in the world, that's got to give the Middle Eastern world some confidence that they haven't had in the last 200, 250 years. And I think that's why Saudi Arabia polls so highly among the Arab world and why they're that, you know, they might go in that direction. It's like they have some relevant sparks for optimism.
- [144:50]
Rudyard Lynch
What you say is they don't have to retreat. Yeah, what you say is very true and it speaks to two different things. The first is that part of the reason Islam still dominant in the Middle east today, where Islam has survived the most so of any pre modern sort of social structure of the great civilizations, because the Middle east has had so much experience with history, they've sort of gotten numb to the historic process and they short circuited to Islam being the thread we've kept the whole time. The second thing is that they've gone through this cycle so many times before of growth and then collapse and then growth and collapse. Where as an example Persia had these huge cities of over a million people out in the grassland and the desert and the mountains during the Islamic golden age. Based off this Cotton agriculture and VC capital and the Silk Road system that were truly advanced. And they were all completely wiped out within a century by the barbarian invasions, by the breakdown of the central economy, by all of these variables. And this was even more exacerbated in Central Asia, where people talk a lot about the decline of the Muslim world was due to the Mongols. Where the Mongols would burn Baghdad, the great city of that entire area, and the Tigris and the Euphrates would go black with the burnt books and red with burnt blood. And we look at that, you can watch the Mongol conquest video to see that something externally happened. But it only kicked these trends into overdrive in the Muslim world, because the Muslims had already gone through their own process of decay, where it exacerbated it. Where in the 14th century, after the Mongol conquest, where the Mongols totally destroyed Khorasan and watched the video on the topic, they just burnt Baghdad, they destroyed Alamut, they leveled the entire region, destroying every major city in Iran is. It took the Muslim world down a step in confidence. Where earlier they had tried rationality. After the Muslim. After the Mongol destruction of the east and the Frankish takeover of the Levant and the Mediterranean and Spain and Sicily, the Muslims were put on the mental defensive in this horrifying trauma from the Mongol pagans just created a sort of a trauma cut, because the Franks and the Christians, who they saw as barbarians with a worse religion than Islam, if they could beat the Muslims, that was bad. If these pagan savages could utterly destroy half of the Muslim world, that was even worse. And so the Muslims tried to do their sort of mystic degeneracy after the mongols and the 14th century. And then Tamburlaine showed up and did it again. And then the Muslims gave up because the Mongols killed probably over 60 million people around the world. They killed millions of people in the Muslim world, incapacitating half of the region. Tamerlane did that again. He killed close to 20 million people, starting in Samarkand, where he was. He was a cattle raider who was crippled from one of his raids, established himself as dictators, dictator of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, and then burned every major city in Iran again, created huge piles of skulls, nearly wiped out the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia, went as far as Russia, then went down to Delhi to weaken the Delhi Sultanate once again. Where the Delhi Sultanate got beat by the Mongols, they got beat by Tamerlane, and they finally got beat by Babur, who conquered the region coming from Central Asia and the. And that was because none of these Muslim armies really wanted to occupy subtropical India. So they seize everything the Delhi Sultanate had that they wanted and then let them govern India again, is that he was sort of the final trauma point for the Muslim world, where they gave up and they're like, screw it, we're just going to be Islamic fundamentalism. Because every time they tried to sort of experience, experiment, they got utterly destroyed by one of their neighbors.
- [149:07]
Austin Padgett
It sounds like someone who got cancer and then tried, like, all the traditional treatments, and then that didn't work. So then they went into the mysticism, like they're going to just try some. Some leaves and some chanting and stuff, some herbs maybe. And then that didn't work. And so they tried, like, jumping on a pogo stick and rubbing a chicken on their face, and that didn't work. So they're like, okay, I'm done.
- [149:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. To close off the thread for this video, I'm going to talk about the archetype of the sensitive young man warlord, which you see again and again in Islamic history, where Ibn Khaldun is the best example, where he was a philosopher, but he was also a commander and a political statesman. With Tamerlane, he's another example where he was also the savage warlord. Killed a lot of people, but he was friends with Ibn Khaldun, and they spent days discussing philosophy and history because he was a deeply learned man. And he built the Samarkand golden age around the art and the stuff he funded from his conquests. Babur, who was a Uzbek son, another threat in Islamic history is fringe. Lesser nobility gets traumatized, sort of short circuits, and then becomes a warlord. That was Babur and Tamerlane. Babur, when he was a teenager, was kicked out of his traditional. I think he might have been the Lord of Samarkand. I might get that wrong. Fled to Afghanistan, formed an army, invaded northern India, wiped out The Indians, outnumbered 10 to 1. And this was the old Muslims who had grown decadent in India and established the Mughals, who ruled India for the early modern period. And we have his journal where he would write out his feelings and his. His. His loves and his brief homosexual crushes he didn't act upon, and his thoughts on India and the ineffability of the human condition. You have Saladin, who was a Kurdish warlord who was under Zengi, who was one of the guys who reacted against the Crusaders, who was a Kurd in Syria. And he installed himself as ruler of Egypt. And he was widely seen as the greatest Muslim ruler at the time, even though he was this cynical dictator who installed himself in power because he was kind to People he conquered. He was patron of the arts. He was an educated philosopher. And you have Shah Ismail, who in the fallout after Tamerlane's destruction of the Persia, he was an Azerbaijani warlord who was both brutal, where he put his enemies heads on spikes and build cages out of their bones. I forget if he did those directly, but it was the kind of thing he did. But he was also highly cultivated and studied philosophy. And he was in all of these different things. And my favorite of these guys is Jalal Adeddin, where when Genghis Khan conquered Khorasan, his father lost the throne and they fled to the desert along the Caspian Sea, where they had to flee the Mongol armies. He went to India, raised an army in India against Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan beat him on the banks of the Indus River. He fled up to Georgia and Azerbaijan, where he raised another army to seize control of Georgia. Then he was kicked out again by the Mongols and his army made it down to Israel and Syria with his Khorasani mercenaries. So this one guy, who is a great man, likely a strategic genius, happened to be paired against Genghis Khan. So he kept on trying to reconquer and do this thing again and again and again. And this archetype, basically the sensitive warlord, you don't see it later in Islamic history because this was the last time the Muslim world had enough cultural dynamism to generate figures like this.
- [153:03]
Austin Padgett
Where afterwards, do you think the president.
- [153:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Conformity.
- [153:07]
Austin Padgett
Do you think the new president of Syria could be one of those warlords because he rose up with Al Qaeda and then got in charge of the ar. The country?
- [153:16]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't know the answer to that question. If I knew, I would tell you.
- [153:20]
Austin Padgett
He doesn't seem. That looks like sensitive maybe, but what else is behind this archetype of the sensitive young warlord? Like, it's like Alexander the Great, right? He was sensitive. Is it. Do you like. Is it when you like poetry or is it like when you're emotional about the conquest, kind of like a rebellion tone or. Yeah, I don't know.
- [153:42]
Rudyard Lynch
It's innately aristocratic. And the Muslim world did have an aristocratic character in this time period.
- [153:49]
Austin Padgett
Okay, I get it.
- [153:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Where the aristocrat balances sort of the aestheticism and the sensitivity with the warrior spirit. Both in the Muslim world at this time period was highly aristocratic because you didn't have parallel structures against it. And that died out with the end of the medieval period in the Muslim world's unification through the gunpowder empires, where gunpowder allowed the mass centralization of Islam. Islam between the Turks, the Persians and the Mughals. And past that threshold, individual character stop being super important in Islamic history because these huge national structures developed. And watch the Gunpowder Empire's video for more details.
- [154:31]
Austin Padgett
Which is kind of like an anti individualism pressure.
- [154:35]
Rudyard Lynch
It is.
- [154:35]
Austin Padgett
Right. If you can't have any thing beyond the.
- [154:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [154:41]
Austin Padgett
Collective system. And so it's like an ubermensch concept basically.
- [154:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [154:44]
Austin Padgett
Also you can play the piano and you're good at sports.
- [154:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Indeed. So I'm going to end this video if you don't have any final comments.
- [154:55]
Austin Padgett
Excellent. Now. Yeah, I think I got through my kind of final summaries about like the confidence Saudi Arabia and then the theme is can it work with modernization? So I think we like hit that from a bunch of different angles using their history. And then the Mongol thing is tough because it's really like, it's almost unfair because you could be on the right path and be hit by the Mongols and have no idea. Like sometimes you get cancer. Right. That's like very difficult cancer. The Mongols just suck, man. They must have psychologically messed up so many people.
- [155:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [155:27]
Austin Padgett
Anyone who was like on the right track that got wrecked by them.
- [155:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, very much so. They did that to the entire region. One of my friends in high school, I was telling him how it was unfair that the English conquered Ireland because being Irish is a super normal thing in Philly. It's just part of the culture. There's a lot of Irish people. And he said, Rudyard, when your starting point is next to England, it's not fair. He said if they were neighbored by practically any other country, the Irish would have maintained independence. But when you're next to England with no counterviewing pressures, you're going to conquer. England is going to conquer you. And that's how I feel about the Mongols with all of the neighboring Asian civilizations.
- [156:06]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And it's really like you always think about, wow, the Mongols went into Eastern Europe and what if they went further and, and well that's. What if they went further. That actually happened to the Islamic world. And it's like it's. You can't really compare it to anything else.
- [156:23]
Rudyard Lynch
No, you can't.
- [156:24]
Austin Padgett
But, but a total genocide or something. But like a loss of your terror. That's like the only thing that, that's worse like. And that did happen to a lot of people because of the Mongols.
- [156:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So next videos in the creation of Eastern Europe.
- [156:42]
Austin Padgett
Excellent. Creation of Eastern Europe and the fires of Mongolia.
- [156:46]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. It's going to cover Eastern European history until the. The rise of the Russian Empire.
- [156:53]
Austin Padgett
Cool. I just saw a really cool video about an army of like 100 Russians who ambushed Mongolians in a frozen swamp, and I spent a lot of time in frozen swamp area water over Christmas, so that was fun. Maybe we'll get into that.
- [157:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, bye.
- [157:09]
Austin Padgett
I mean, the the Ice Warriors. All right. And yeah, check out my show on YouTube. Austin Padgett Ludwig Never Mises Merch Store Bitcoin Donate Link Bye.
- [157:20]
Rudyard Lynch
History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.