Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?
One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill “Eurabia” claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.
The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or popularised the term with her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.
A good example is the video “Muslim Demographics,” an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an “Islamic republic” by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children — a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a “Muslim state” by 2050 and that “in only 15 years” the Dutch population would be half Muslim. “Some studies show that, at Islam’s current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world,” the video declares as it urges viewers to “share the Gospel message in a changing world.”
The BBC produced its own video entitled “Welcome to Eurabia?” that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video’s claims. Watching “Muslim Demographics” and “Welcome to Eurabia?” back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of “Eurabia” created by Oren Neu Dag.
Articles defending the “Eurabia” claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (here’s the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:
Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.
Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…
“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.
The proven demographic fact that birth rates have been falling among Muslim women, both in Muslim majority countries and western countries where Muslims have migrated, is not new. Nor are articles debunking the idea that Muslims will become the majority in Europe (see here and here and here). But my own experience in discussing this with non-Muslims in Europe and the United States says this message does not seem to be getting through. The fact that Muslim birth rates, while still higher than those for non-Muslims, are actually falling seems to surprise people who do not follow these issues closely.
Atheists, Jews, Mormons top U.S. religious knowledge poll
Atheists and agnostics may not believe in God or gods but they know a thing or two about them, according to a survey of religious knowledge among Americans released on Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
“On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 … Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers,” Pew said. It found Protestants answered 16 correctly and Catholics on average 14.7.
“While previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world’s developed nations, this survey shows that large numbers of Americans are not well informed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own,” said Pew, which is based in Washington.
Highlights of the survey include:
- More than four-in-10 Catholics do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the body and blood of Jesus.
- About half of Protestants cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person who sparked the Protestant Reformation.
- Less than half identified Buddhism as the Dalai Lama’s religion, 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon and 54 percent correctly said the Koran is the Islamic holy book. More than 80 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic.
This reminded me a survey I conducted several years ago. The purpose was to find out how much our university students know about Stalin. Here is the description of the results:
According to one professor most MSU students do not know who Stalin was. I was very surprised and decided to survey my students. Of 23 present only 13 raised their hands indicating they knew who Stalin was. Was my small sample a good representation of the student population at our university? This was a statistics class, composed mostly of non-science students. As an exercise in data gathering I asked each student to conduct a survey in another class on campus. Find the fraction of students declaring “I know who Joseph Stalin was.” I now have 19 samples based on 439 students. On the average 72% of polled students think they know who Stalin was. The actual results are shown in the following table . . .
Ludwik Kowalski (Ph.D.)
the author of “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality,” at
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life /intro.html
It is an autobiography illustrating my evolution from one extreme to another–from a devoted Stalinist to an active anti-communist. This testimony is based on a diary I kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA).
Low support for radicalism among European Muslims — Pew report
Support for radical Islamist groups is low among European Muslims and some leading groups with overseas roots are now cooperating with local governments and encouraging Muslims to vote, according to a new report.
European groups linked to wider Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami now focus more on conditions for Muslims in Europe than their original ideologies from Egypt and Pakistan, according to the report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report also cited tensions between “jihadists” and peaceful Islamists in Europe, saying some groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood were working with police to counter militants.
“By most accounts, support for radical extremist groups is relatively low among Muslims in Europe,” it said. “Nevertheless, such groups have been central to the public discussion of Islam in Europe, especially in recent years.”
The report said supporters of European groups with links to foreign Islamist movements often showed little interest in their founding ideologies, which critics say are radical and anti-Western. Although some groups promoted militant views, others dealt only with religious issues or education, making it difficult to generalise about Muslim organisations in Western Europe.
Read the full story here. For the text of the report “Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe”, click here.
This is assuming that the violent jihadis and the peaceful Islamists have different aims. Why carry out a destructive Islamic attack ~ when you can simply influence politicians to make laws Shari’a compliant. Both groups envision an end to western freedom and rights and the establishment of a world wide Islamic state.
Pew dissects U.S. “Millennials” on issues of faith and culture
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has just issued a report that examines issues of faith and culture among Americans between the age of 18 and 29 — a demographic group that has been dubbed the “Millennials” because most came of age around 2000. You can see our story here and the report here.
A couple of things come to mind. One is the finding that Millennials were far more likely than their elders from “Generation X” and the “Baby Boom” to be unaffiliated with a specific faith. In the context of recent American history, Generation X was born between 1965 and 1980, while Baby Boomers flooded the country from 1946 to 1964.
The report found one-in-four American Millennials unaffiliated with any specific faith, compared to 20 percent of Generation Xers at a comparable point in their lives (the late 1990s). Only 13 percent of Baby Boomers were religiously “unaffiliated” in the late 1970s when they were roughly the age Millennials are now.
There are some U.S. religious conservatives who will no doubt sound the alarm and point to these numbers as yet another example of moral decline. But one striking thing about the number is that, as the appendix at the end of the report makes clear, three in four young American adults are affiliated with a religious faith. I would guess that such a figure would be far higher than a comparable one for, say, many countries in western Europe. Such a comparison could be instructive, if the data were available.
The report is also just the latest to highlight the generation chasm that exists on the issue of gay rights. For example, the report said that Pew’s massive 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found young adults to be almost twice as likely to say homosexuality should be accepted by society as those 65 and older, 63 percent versus 35 percent.
On the issue of abortion rights — the hottest of the hot-button topics in America — the report had some intriguing findings. I think it’s worth quoting the report here:
This picture was already used in another posting a couple of months ago.
U.S. South remains undisputed “Bible Belt”
The U.S. South remains the undisputed “Bible Belt” of America and Mississippi is its buckle, according to a new bit of number crunching from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. You can see the interactive report here.
Pew has attempted a state-by-state ranking of U.S. religiosity using four measures that draw on polling data: the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God.
Mississippi tops all four rankings with 82 percent of its adult population saying religion is very important in their lives. In fact, the top 10 states by this measure are all in the South (some would say nine out of 10 as it includes Oklahoma. But many analysts lump Oklahoma in the southern category based on its politics and culture as well as its geography as it shares borders with Texas and Arkansas.)
On frequency of worship practice, Utah — the Mormon heartland — ranked number two with 57 percent of adults there saying they attend religious services at least once a week. Kansas was number 10 here but the other states were all Southern.
In the category of absolute certainty in the belief of God, New Hampshire and Vermont were rock bottom at 54 percent. But the national average here was 71 percent.
(Photo: Reuters file)
How do these values compare to the average level of college education in those same states?
Just wondering.
Pew poll shows modest rise in concerns about Islamic extremism
A new poll by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows a modest rise in concern among Americans about the threat of Islamic militancy following the deadly shootings in Fort Hood, Texas, earlier this month. Here is a link to the survey.
The nationwide survey, conducted among over 1,000 Americans, found 52 percent were “very concerned” about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the United States compared to 46 percent in April of 2007.
It also found that 49 percent were very concerned about the “rise of Islamic extremism around the world” compared to 48 percent in April of 2007.
The survey was conducted Nov. 12-15, a week after 13 people were killed in a shooting at the Fort Hood Army post. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim born in the United States to immigrant parents, has been charged with murder in the case. U.S. intelligence agencies have said he tried to contact Islamists with suspected al Qaeda ties.
(Photo: Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the the suspect in the mass shooting at the U.S. Army post in Fort Hood, Texas. REUTERS/Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences/Handout)
I think the problem is mainly due to religious torch bearers… Any religious torch bearer indulges in creating lavish empire of slaves for himself… Government should subject all religious torch bearers to scrutiny and subject to capital punishments for all deeds done under inspiration of unprovable things by laws of MORTALS. People should be selected in jobs on meritocracy and not on basis of religious beliefs… Religious people destroy peace.
Pew maps the Muslim world
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life just released a demographic study of the Muslim world it says is “the largest project of its kind to date.” Click here http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=450 to see the report ”Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population.”
The report drew on data from 232 countries and territories and involved Pew researchers working with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists around the world. It is certainly a useful reference for anyone interested in the Islamic world.
Among its highlights:
- There are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages in the world today, about 23 percent of the global population of 6.8 billion. (By contrast, various estimates put the number of Christians worldwide at about two billion).
- Over 60 percent of Muslims live in Asia and one-fifth in the Middle East and North Africa.
- More than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of their global population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. Muslims are a minority in India but it has the third-largest Muslim population (161 million).
What if the population receded down to endangered species? Will it mean peace, food, environmental safety in the world? Do we need to make irresistible sexually arousing products which enhance the ultimate pleasure and cause decline in population?
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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revel224: “to show the dastardly Europeans who colonized, plundered, looted, and murdered countless souls and treasures of 3rd world many of them Muslims, what happens when a shoe is on the other foot.”
Revel- you discredit your own statement here when you lump all of “Europe” together, when in fact it was a mere handful of European nations that were largely responsible for what you’re talking about. The British in particular, and the Dutch, French and Belgians to a far lesser extent, did indeed colonise large swathes of the Muslim world. But the vast majority of Europe did not. The Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Germans, Finns, Hungarians among others had absolutely nothing to do with colonisation of Muslim countries. Quite the opposite, as many of them were victims of corrupt Muslim colonisation thru e.g. the Ottoman Turks, who thrice failed to conquer Vienna and other vast regions.
In fact, the bulk of Europe largely avoided colonisation alltogether and weren’t involved in the dishonour of the slave trade. This is one reason that the Scandinavians and Germans have the most successful economies today- they have a culture that’s never relied on slave labour and thus has become adapted to doing its own manual labour and doing it well, hence their manufacturing prowess.
Ironically, this historical fact also seems to have a correspondence in the levels of Muslim settlement in the European countries that were colonisers. It’s very low in Scandinavia and Germany, which has only about 2 million Muslims (the vast majority of immigrants to Germany are east Europeans, Russians and ethnic Germans from North America, *not* Turks as often believed), somewhat higher in France and the Netherlands (not nearly as high as often claimed), but growing significantly only in Britain, which was indeed the major coloniser in the Muslim world. About 2.5-3 million Muslims reside in the UK, but that number is indeed growing quite quickly due to heavy immigration under both Labour and Tories to provide cheap Labour for businesses, and unlike Continent European countries, Britain has sharia law and courts in many districts as well as Islamic customs predominating there. See Tower Hamlets or Manchester for examples.
So the United Kingdom and England in particular are indeed taking on an increasingly Islamic character, along with a corrupt government whichever major party is leading it with a slavish devotion to the wishes of rich campaign donors (one reason why I and so many other Britons have left). But that’s not true of the rest of Europe. Don’t lump them together so.