I landed all of my family members as a muslim. They all did ramadans I guess so I constantly had 0 decadence. I think you guys haven't extensively played muslims since all the changes. I admit I get annoyed at constant pop up spam about decadent members... otherwise... I like it.
Even in the most recent patch, landing male members of your dynasty is a path to destruction.
You won't see it in the first 100 years. And you won't see it in a realm of less than 200 holdings. But it will happen.
What eventually happens is that your fellow dynasty members breed like rabbits if they have titles. So, even if you land people to help them not become decadent (it helps, but isn't a guarantee), and they try to land their sons, there's eventually more males than titles to go around. And you can't ever convince enough men to pick the correct school of Islam when you have 250 men in your dynasty running around.
So what happens is eventually having multiple members of your dynasty all doing Ramadan and going on Hajj's and trying to land sons does not do enough to correct the decadence problem. As far as I can tell, either my vassal male members of the dynasty are lazy, or they don't takfir their own kids when their sons get decadent and won't straighten up, forcing you to do it. Which makes them angry because you imprisoned their sons. Then you start taking tyranny penalties for imprisoning males that are decadent, but won't straighten up again. And the next thing you know, you're sitting on a pile of angry vassals.
So your choices end up being one of the following:
1) Never land males in your dynasty except your heir while also limiting your fertility by not taking as many fertile wives. (For Islamic tribes, this is a real problem because you take a prestige hit for not having enough wives.)
2) Land them, wait a couple of centuries, and start eating the tyranny penalties. Eventually, you will fight regular civil wars with your vassals over the issue (if you are lucky, you can liquidate some family during these wars).
3) Land them, wait a couple of centuries, and start eating the decadence penalties. If you are Caliph, you can probably forestall decadence revolts by strategically calling jihads to clear it when it's sitting at 80% or more. If you aren't Caliph, have a plan to crush decadence revolts.
4) Land them, wait a couple of centuries, and start eating decadence penalties. Let the decadence revolts happen, and just reclaim your realm periodically. Or use it as an excuse to start from scratch. You could probably get three to five new empires during a full game this way.
I'm not saying that the system is bugged or broken, but insanely large Islamic realms are basically destined to collapse sooner or later, more so than their counterparts in other faiths. The catch is that you can play ahistorically and never land family, and get around the system. It's kind of weird that the best way to play Muslim realms over the long term is to do the opposite of what most Muslim dynasties did in the period.
Sometimes I miss portions of the old system, where at least an orgy of fighting and killing between the brothers upon succession has some historical basis. But I kind of wish that decadence rewarded giving more power to your own sons, and letting them settle things upon succession. Not like in the old system where you gave land to one son, and let him wipe his brothers out easily, but instead where you would be encouraged to land them all with significant territories so they could actually fight among themselves in a real way.
