Fears of Eurabian future unfounded

IN 2005, a Muslim community in the district of Olten, in northern Switzerland, applied for a permit to erect a 6m-high minaret on the roof of its community centre.

Local residents formed a committee to fight it, collecting 115,000 signatures on a "no minaret" petition. The result was this week's historic Swiss prohibition on new minarets, which has provoked a backlash from Muslim communities around the world and prompted fresh consternation over the so-called Islamisation of Europe.

The majority decision by 57.5 per cent of Swiss voters stirred anger throughout the Muslim world. "This is the hatred of Swiss people against Muslim communities; they don't want to see a Muslim presence in their country," said Maskuri Abdillah, head of Indonesia's largest Muslim group, Nahdlatul Ulama. Egypt's grand mufti called it an insult to Muslims and "an attack on freedom of beliefs". A leading Pakistani politician said the decision reflects "extreme Islamophobia among people in the West" and "an effort to provoke Muslims and prompt a clash between Islam and the West".

The debate is the latest manifestation of growing angst across Europe over the rise of so-called "Eurabia", a continent with a large Muslim population whose growth rate well outstrips that of non-Muslims, prompting predictions that Muslims will outnumber Christians within decades.

Europe's political leaders are struggling to confront these fears, which are given loudest voice by far Right-wing politicians but are much more widely held.

In France this week, a spokesman for President Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-Right Union for a Popular Majority said the Swiss debate reflected widespread alarm in Europe over radical Islam, while in Germany, a senior MP from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Party said the fear of growing Islamisation "must be taken seriously".

The debate has been fuelled by alarming projections touted by conservative Christian groups, such as a video called Muslim Demographics posted on YouTube which paints a dire picture of a looming Muslim takeover. The video uses slick graphics, a professional voiceover and dramatic music to underscore its "call to action", which has been viewed on the internet more than 10 million times since March.

The video claims Muslim communities in Europe have a fertility rate more than four times higher than those of non-Muslims, which will result in the Muslim population doubling to 104 million in 20 years. It says that in France, the number of children born to every Muslim family averages 8.1, compared with 1.8 for non-Muslims, while in The Netherlands, half of the newborns are Muslims. It contains the startling claim: "In just 39 years, France will be an Islamic republic."

"The world is changing," the video warns. "The global culture our children inherit will be vastly different than what it is today. In a matter of years, Europe as we know it will cease to exist."

A closer look at the statistics shows the true picture is much less dramatic. A BBC analysis of the figures used in Muslim Demographics found that many of them had been exaggerated, distorted or, in some cases, simply made up.

For example, the Muslim population of Belgium is, in fact, 6 per cent, not 25 per cent, and no country in the world has a fertility rate as high as 8.1. (The highest is Nigeria at 7.15.) Germany's chief statistician has flatly denied a claim attributed to his office that Germany "will be a Muslim state by the year 2050", describing the video projections as "the worst way to use statistical data".

The highly respected Pew Research Centre estimates Europe's total Muslim population at 38 million, or 5 per cent. Western Europe has 20 million. The largest group is in France which, according to the Pew figures, has 3.5 million Muslims, about 6 per cent of the population. Next is Britain with 1.6 million Muslims, representing 2.7 per cent. The Netherlands has 946,000, or 5.7 per cent; Belgium 281,000, or 3 per cent; and Switzerland 323,000, which is 4.3 per cent.

However, in some major EU cities, Muslim populations exceed 20 per cent, according to the US Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pew Centre is working on a study to be released next year on growth rates in Muslim populations worldwide. In the meantime, the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies says the estimates being touted show inconsistencies and should be "treated with great caution", because many countries have poor data or do not keep statistics at all on their citizens' religious beliefs.

The Brookings Institution in Washington says the assertion that Muslims are gaining demographically across Europe is a "myth". It points out that Muslims are not a cohesive group, that there are high rates of inter-marriage and that Muslim birth rates tend to fall after they migrate.

Research suggests the Eurabia hyperbole is overwrought. However, undoubtedly, a significant demographic shift is under way.

If US Republican commentator Daniel Pipes is right, Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is giving way to Islam. "When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilisation The great national cultures -- Italian, French, English and others -- will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity." The rhetoric employed by Islamist politicians does little to calm the fears. The anti-minaret committee in Switzerland described the minaret as "a symbol of religious-political power", citing a poem composed by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, which resulted in him serving four months in jail for inciting religious hatred. The poem included the line: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers."

The YouTube video Muslim Demographics quotes Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as saying: "Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without guns, without swords, without conquest. We don't need terrorists, we don't need homicide bombers. The 50 million Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades."

Events of recent years have helped inflame the debate: the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings; the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh for his film Submission, which criticised Islam's treatment of women; the 2006 Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed; the French ban on the Muslim headscarf; and the 2005 Paris riots, described as Muslim riots although they were more about poverty than religion.

At the heart of much of the tension is the socio-economic disadvantage and lack of assimilation of Europe's Muslims, which is in stark contrast, for example, to the US, where Muslims are well-integrated and relatively well-off.

A paper by the US Council on Foreign Relations reports: "Most analysts say that many of Western Europe's Muslims are poorly integrated into society. They cite closed ethnic neighbourhoods, high crime rates in Muslim communities, calls for use of sharia law, the wearing of the veil and other examples as evidence of a conflict with European values."

The report says Muslims are more likely to be poor and live in segregated, crime-prone neighbourhoods. Many self-segregate because of language barriers and cultural mores, such as the Muslim prohibition on drinking.

Unemployment rates are up to double those for other minorities.

Bassam Tibi, a German Muslim academic who holds a professorship at Cornell University and is director of the Centre for International Affairs at the University of Gottingen, says European societies offer limited opportunities to Muslim immigrants, even those with citizenship. "In America, if you get citizenship, you're an American," he says, whereas Muslims in Europe are not seen as "citizens of the heart".

He says many Muslim immigrants contribute to the problem by seeing themselves as members of a "transnational Muslim community" with no obligations to European society. "They themselves create obstacles. There is a mutual rejection of one another."

Tibi hopes that Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans can learn to live in harmony, as they did in medieval Islamic Spain. If they can't, he warns: "It's a recipe for civil war".