As I wrote above, the population of Africa will double by 2050. These are the (very serious and reliable) projections of the United Nations.
It's not as reliable as you think. Population predictions cannot be taken for that reliable more than 1-2 decades in the future. A lot can change in the meantime. But I concede that you have a point in so far as that sub-saharan Africa (rather than the Middle East or North Africa) will be the "last man standing" in terms of high birth rates. On the flip side, I do not know how viable an Africa with 2 or 3 billion inhabitants is, anyways. We're already dangerously close to Earth's carrying capacity, and I suspect (and fear) that if such a Malthusian happens anywhere, it's going to be in subsaharan Africa. The good news though, as I mentioned, is that over the past decades world population projections have been consistently corrected downwards and the massive threat of overpopulation that loomed at the horizon isn't as nearly as big as it used to be 30 or 40 years ago.
I used to think like you, which is why I didn't worry too much. But Maghrebian immigrants have been living in big European cities, even in expensive central Paris, for over 50 years now. The third and even fourth generations are being born now and show no sign of slowing down. The official French statistics actually show that the number of children born in France with two non-European parents has increased by 35% between 1998 and 2009.
Let's look at the average number of kids born in North Africa for 2012 (I've taken these figures are from the CIA factbook, though I'm aware the UN has similar figures):
Egypt - 2.94
Libya - 2.90
Morocco - 2.19
Tunisia - 2.02
Algeria - 1.74
There's also a few other predominantly Islamic countries to take a look at:
Bangladesh - 2.55
Indonesia - 2.23
Turkmenistan - 2.14
Turkey - 2.13
Azerbaijan - 1.92
Iran - 1.87
Bahrain - 1.86
Uzbekistan - 1.86
Lebanon - 1.67
Back to North Africa, the UN gives the following average numbers of kids per woman for the period 2010-2015 (as you can see, the figures are all in roughly the same order of magnitude):
Egypt - 2.64
Libya - 2.41
Morocco - 2.18
Algeria - 2.14
Tunisia - 1.91
Now, if you compare this with the situation 50 years earlier (1960-1965):
Algeria - 7.38
Tunisia - 7.25
Libya - 7.18
Morocco - 7.15
Egypt - 6.55
It's very clear that these countries are well in demographic transition and it's only a matter of a few decades before they slip into sub-replacement fertility. I've been trying to make the point that this has little to do with Westernization because it's happening universally around the globe, and some countries (read: Western Europe, but also for instance Japan) were first in this development and areas like the Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are getting there only now or in the near-future.
LeBrok brought up that this is an effect of contraceptives and family planning but this has surprisingly little to do with it (the process is happening in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh too, where it certainly has little to do with it!), it's solely the effect of urbanization in my opinion. Urban lifestyle, wether rich or poor, does not support or need large traditional extended families like they exist traditional in rural farming communities. You need a large crew to work a traditional farm, but there's no need for that when you live in a city. There's also additional pressures like increased housing costs, increased costs of living (you can't live on subsistence agriculture in a city). None of this requires being wealthy, well-educated or culturally particularly westernized for this to affect you, which is exactly why this phenomenon is happening globally.
I concede you have a point in so far as that sub-saharan Africa (as well as poorer, less developed countries in Asia/Middle East - in particular Afghanistan and Yemen) are much farther away from such a development as the countries I mentioned above. And, I concede that the situation in France may indeed be somewhat unique in so far as that it has a large faction of it's immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa (due to to the fact that these were formerly part of it's colonial empire).
But most Muslims today have children before their 30's, so even if they become more moderate later that won't affect their birth rate.
It is so obvious for people like us that we could wonder why anybody would want to follow a religion like Islam. Yet it is the fastest growing religion on Earth. You just can't apply our logic and mindset to Third World people.
Well, by the same logic, why would anybody follow a religion like Christianity? As I said before, Christianity and Judaism in their essence are just as bad, just as violence-endorsing, just as women-discriminating and intolerant as Islam. And the claim that it's only the Old Testament and that the Old Testament "doesn't count anymore" is certainly a strawman argument since there's enough quotes in New Testament as well to back this. Christianity has the same claim for universalist salvation as Islam (read: everybody should convert to Christianity/Islam, respectively), and if you look beyond the theoretical framework, a brief glance into history demonstrates that Christianity is a very violent and violence-endorsing religion, just like Islam. So what is different? Granted, there are theological differences:
- most notably that the Quran is believed the final and uncorrupted word of God, *classical* Arabic is the language of God, and that a translation of it is frowned upon (a fact that I find quite ironic concerning. Note that this didn't prevent Islam from spreading into non-Arabic countries, and this also didn't prevent most Muslims from the fact that they cannot speak or read classical Arabic. This is a fact, of course, that has been shamelessly exploited by hatred-preachers in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan to incite hate and violence (then again, how does this differ from the Pope telling medieval Christians in Europe from going on a crusade?).
- when it comes to the topic of monotheism, Islam is more self-consistent (one might also use the word "unforgiving") than either Judaism or Christianity. Over the centuries this has produced a destructive tendency of iconoclasm. But, it should be mentioned that we find the same destructive tendency for iconoclasm also in Christianity (to pick a few examples, the felling of Thor's Oak in Germany by St. Boniface, or the massive rampages against Church art by Protestants during the reformation). At the same time the Shi'ites (who in my opinion have some views that them more different from Sunni Islam than the Protestant/Catholic difference, even though every Muslim I've discussed this topic with before thinks it's exactly vice versa), are rather relaxed on the issue, and it was usually in the Shi'ite context that depictions of the prophet Mohammed were made.
The big difference is that for the past 400-500 years (a trend that was ironically started with the Reformation), the West has been moving away from Christianity as the sole, unabashed source of authority (granted, there are Christians who would love to reverse this, but I'll get back to that topic at a later point). There is nothing, however, that prevents Muslims from doing the same.
At the flip point, this extremist, puritanical interpretation of Islam that is plagueing the world today is certainly not a product of an 800 year long trend but merely a product of the 20th century. For the greater part, Muslims 150 or 200 years ago were a lot more relaxed when it came to the treatment of religious minorities and even (to a degree) for the treatment of women than some (textbook examples would be Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia) do now. What can be done about that? I mentioned that this radical ideology will eventually disappear on it's own and I find that I have good reasons to believe so: my point with radical Islam was actually that bin Laden's war against the West has cost the lives of many more Muslims than non-Muslims. And Muslims, at least in the Arab world and the more developed parts of the Islamic world, I would say, are actually quite aware of this. Otherwise the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya wouldn't have happened the way that they did. You might argue now, what about the Islamist parties that arose from the elections in Egypt and Tunisia? Well, I might ask, what is an Islamist? Somebody who wants to bring Islamic ideas into politics? Somebody who wants to overthrow democratic principles and create a theocracy? An Islamist can be all and none of that, the word is too vaguely defined. In my opinion, as long as they adhere to strict non-violence, seek to come to power in an election, do not seek to infringe the freedoms granted by the constitution, and most importantly, concede to
relinquish their powers when they have been defeated in an election, I honestly don't see what should be wrong with Islamists, because at the end of the day, they would differ fairly little from "Christian" (even if in name only) parties in Europe, or from politicians in the United States who consider themselves "Christians" - and which obviously violate the Western principles of secularism.
Actually I have been referring all the time to African immigrants, and African Muslims. I am much less concerned about the generally more civilised Turkish immigrants, or other Middle Easterners who are only tiny minorities in Europe. As for Bosnians and Albanians, although they were traditionally Muslim, the vast majority of them are now Atheistic/Agnostics or at least non-religious. They also don't have sky high birthrates like Maghrebians.
This goes more or less hand in hand with what I postulated above, that the situation in France may be somewhat special compared to other parts of Europe.
This thread has raised two very different, yet equally worrying problems. One of them is the lack of integration of Muslims in Western societies and the possible confrontation that will result from it. But the main topic discussed is the long-term replacement (even partial) of the native European population by the unrestrained flow of (mostly) Black and Berber African immigrants (Muslim or Christian), because Africans still have very high birthrates both in African and in Europe, and according to the UN this is not going to change before several generations - by which time Europe might already be over half African.
Regarding the former, I do not believe that such a violent confrontation and a threat by Islam that the alarmists see as inevitable is as inevitable as people think. What I do believe is actually inevitable is the intellectual and especially critical altercation with Islam and Islamic ideas (and also, which of what we perceive as "Islamic" is actually genuinely Islamic, and what are just behaviours/customs that are done on the pretext of Islam). Much of what commonly perceive as wrong or as dangerous in Islam has actually surprisingly little (if any) basis in the Quran or the Hadith (to pick one of the most abominable examples, female genital mutilation). But, the way I see it, this is something not only Europe needs to do, but the entire world.
Regarding the latter, it remains to be seen how much of a problem this really will be. My opinion is that if we give in to the alarmism, we're paving the ground for right-wing demagogues to one day seize power again in Europe and unleash another round of terror and genocide - in the case of which Europe as we know and love would be over just as well.
I believe it is due to the fact that Islam is political, politics and religion are intertwined in the muslim world, where in Germany, democracy and religion are pushed apart as much as possible. Having been living in Berlin for some time now, I think Germans in general are very uncomfortable with criticizing Islam. However, Islam and sharia law are and ideology that threatens the fundamentals of post-Enlightenment Europe and modern democracy. It should be dealt with very seriously.
Is that really so? I think the Enlightment consensus has been subverted across the board for decades, if not longer. I mean, we have a party that labels itself "Christian Democratic" (even if they are in name only), and the danger of Christian fundamentalists eroding the separation of religion and state, as mentioned before is a very real and very acute problem in the United States. Though I should add, out of fairness, the Christian fundamentalists in the United States are just as selective as their Islamic counterparts, for instance, I haven't yet seen a Christian fundamentalist in the US argue that children who insult their parents should face the death penalty...
The
real problem the Islam really has with western ideas of separation of religion and state is that these principles were unanimously enforced in the Islamic world through autoritarianism and dictatorship, and not through democracy. How would they perceive as something beneficial if it came as a means of oppression (by henchmen regimes of the West, it should be added)? You have to consider that this is also exactly the environment in which the puritanical, violence-endorsing Islam that we so much perceive as a threat right now evolved in. What I've been trying to say is that the feeding ground that violent Islam successfully fed on for the past 60 years is slowly disappearing.
