Muslims Have Not Won a War of Conquest In Centuries: WHY?

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

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

They explore deeper patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:00:00]

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

Simone Collins (2): Oh, not again,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right?

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

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so then I just started going through in my head, like the Ottomans, no. Like they were terrible in World War I like, like practically a joke [00:02:00] player. The, the Yo Kippur War. The Yo Kippur war was hilarious, and we’ll go into it as more of an example of this wider phenomenon, but like Israel little, at that time, Israel was not like the major arms producer it is today.

It didn’t have technology. There were this fledgling little

Simone Collins (2): country.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A fledgling little barely together country. And it looked, felt like, a group of like thugs. You know, there’s a scene, the joke scene in the movie where a group of thugs like chases some, some girl into like a back alley or follows her back there.

And then you just hear a bunch of, like, I was thinking that scene from India comes out

Simone Collins (2): where like that one guy is like dancing around with his knife and then Indiana Jones takes out a gun and shoots him.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s way different for that. I’m, I’m talking about the scene where, because you see this in a lot of movies, a bunch of big, burly guys will like, follow somebody who looks really defenseless into a back alley to jump them.

And then somehow the, the, the girl like knocks out all of them at once.

Speaker 5: Get a load of this guy.

[00:03:00] Oh, humanity. You never failed to disappoint me, .

Unaware that with the slightest nudge, the world could crash down around me. No. For the exercise, gentlemen. I found it bracing.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, keep in mind this was a surprise war. They had more military manpower. They had higher tech, military manpower. Mm-hmm. And they had multiple countries attacking simultaneously. Yeah. And they still lost a ton of territory.

So like, how does this happen? Right. How, how, and then I started to go further because I was like, okay, surely this is just like my [00:04:00] bias and I’m not knowing all these instances of recent Muslim victories. Sure. So I go to AI and I’m like, when was the last time a Muslim force durably took land and kept it from a non-Muslim force?

Okay. Yeah. And so it goes the ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Now, no, I’ll point out why this one doesn’t actually count, but we’ll go through 1517. So, the mammal salt in it nominally Sunni Muslim rulership but ruled a population that was 85 to 90% non-Muslim is. Part of the problem here. At the time Coptic, Christians, Greek and, and Jews.

So, specifically here, Egypt during this time, like even in this example, was actually ruled by Muslims already. It just had a non-Muslim majority population and it was conquered by the Ottomans. And you’ve got a problem with the Ottomans because the Ottomans do what I said that Saudi Arabia should do.

Mm-hmm. I was like. Look, Saudi Arabia, you guys [00:05:00] suck at war. This is how this came up, right? Like I was like, you guys are, are comically bad. You can’t even keep Yemen under control and it’s on your border and destitute and also Muslim. Oh dear. So, so I was like, you should just, you know, put a bunch of Christians, you know, like Protestants and Jews in charge of your troops.

Troops and you do fine. And then I had this, this thought, oh, no, no. Oh no. That’s exactly what the ottomans did. Not you, you thinking Don’t stop. No. So the Ottomans did sort of what like the UAE and the Saudis do. So if you go to the, the Muslim countries that are operating really well and very prosperous these days like Qatar in Saudi Arabia and the UAE anybody who’s been there knows that everything, or a lot of it is actually managed by well, Jews and Protestants who are imported to do finances, logistics, not

Simone Collins (2): like broadly just.

Other people.

Malcolm Collins: We’ll talk about the Catholic situation in a bit. But Catholics,

Simone Collins (2): oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: And they [00:06