I asked Grok to list all the countries that were colonized by Muslims

Twitter ^ | May 12, 2025 | Daniel Alman from Squirrel Hill @DanielAlmanPGH

[paudio]

I think Grok convulated the predominantly Muslim countries and countries once colonized by Muslim. As far as I know, Indonesia never been under Ottoman or Indian Moghul. Islam spread but not by Islamic colonization. Meanwhile, countries like Spain, Serbia, Albania, part of Italy and yes, Turkey are all colonized by them.

[Flag_This]

"Are you complaining Muslims do it better than Christians?"

You could probably count on one finger the number of times islam is associated with colonization. "Colonization" is almost always associated with western European countries, in popular media, despite the fact the muslims were doing it hundreds of years before many of those countries were nation states.

[magua]

I challenged it on Senegal and this is what it said. Senegal considers itself to be a secular state even though 97% of the population is Muslim. Once again I come back to it’s all how you ask the question.

[EvilCapitalist]

Don’t forget France.

[Verginius Rufus]

Albania and Bosnia came under Muslim rule for centuries. In Albania something like 70% of the locals converted. In Bosnia maybe 40 to 50%. But there were not many outsiders who settled there. I think in the case of Serbia any converts to Islam were kicked out when Serbia threw off Turkish rule. In Greece any Muslim converts were considered Turks and most of them left in the population exchange in the early 1920s (some were allowed to stay in eastern Thrace).

Bulgaria was also under Turkish rule for a long time--now 13.7% Muslim. Parts of Croatia were under Muslim rule but only 2% of its population is Muslim (some of those could be immigrants from Muslim areas of former Yugoslavia).

[poconopundit]

Also missed a very big Muslim country, Bengla Desh, with an estimated 150 million Muslims.

[nitzy]

I understand where you are coming from but I don’t know if I fully agree with it. Conquest and colonization are not the same thing.

Conquest involves two somewhat comparable entities engaging in a battle and the invading force vanquishing the other to take their land/belongings/property/children/etc...

Colonization involves two incomparable entities where the taking of the land involves no or very little violence to achieve. The outcome is predetermined when the colonization begins.

When Germany invaded France in WWII...that was conquest.
When Europeans took over the new world and South Africa it was mainly colonization. Certainly there were battles here and there but they were almost never close. So much of the new world was newly depopulated from the plagues that spread through the land in the 16th and 17 centuries that there was not much resistance accept in the western plains.

If a new island popped up in the middle of the Atlantic and your family and friends moved there, you would be colonizing it. If there were primitive hunter gatherers existed on the landscape you would still be colonizing it but it would be closer to conquest. If there were modern people with technology, armaments, infrastructure, etc... and you took it from them....it would be conquest.

I think there is a moral difference between the 2. They are on 2 ends of the same spectrum.

I am not saying that one is universally right and the other universally wrong...but there is a difference.

[RoosterRedux]

Agreed. If you don’t challenge and argue with AI, you probably won’t get good work.

[metmom]

The list of ones NOT colonized by muzzies would be shorter.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the link in a great thread. BUMP!

[RoosterRedux]

I posted a comment on this FR thread about how conversational AI platforms are prone to sycophancy (it might be useful to some on this thread).

Here's the thread:

AI endorses and affirms your delusions

Here's my comment:

One way around AI’s tendency to adapt to perceived user preferences (what might be called sycophancy) is to ask it to respond from a purely logical point of view.

The pretraining process teaches AI patterns, reasoning methods, and how to navigate logical structures. In other words, it’s designed to analyze the data it was trained on using logical consistency.

So when you prompt it to respond logically, it will prioritize formal reasoning and rely on its pretrained knowledge base and internal structures—largely independent of any personalization layers or conversational bias toward your style or preferences.

[SmokingJoe]

Which South and Central African countries are those?
Plus of course Indonesia is in South East Asia, not Africa.

[SmokingJoe]

None of whom is a Muslim country.

[Jan_Sobieski]

Philippines,

[SmokingJoe]

Senegal was colonized by France.
They still speak France in addition to their local languages.

[Lizavetta]

None of whom is a Muslim country.

For now.

Muslims are aggressive and fight for their beliefs.

Current Americans, for the most part, do not.

[SmokingJoe]

When was the Philippines colonized by a Muslim country and which Muslim country was that?

[PIF]

or Mauritania

[PIF]

Muslims colonize, or invade, or take over a country by Hiraj (sp): peaceful conquest.

[scrabblehack]

I guess Saudi Arabia was left out because they were all home-grown rather than colonists.