Islam Remembers What the West Forgot

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Mediterranean world was Christian. But, within fifty years of Muhammad’s flight to Medina in 622, the armies of Islam had swept over the southern coast of the Inland Sea. Early in the eighth century, Arabs and Berbers brushed aside weak Visigoth resistance, overran Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where on of the decisive battles of history was fought. At Tours, the “Hammer of the Franks,” Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, who withdrew back over the mountains. Except for the tiny kingdom of the Asturias, which would be the base camp of the Spanish Reconquista, Islam dominated the Iberian peninsula for centuries. Not until 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella finally drive the Moors out of Spain.

Indicators everywhere suggest Islam is rising again. An Islamic secessionist movement is active in the Philippines. Muslim troops battle Christian secessionists in Indonesia. From Palestine to Pakistan, street mobs cheered the slaughter at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. For years, the Afghani Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cells and dispatched holy warriors into the old Soviet republics of Central Asia and to assist Chechen rebels fighting in Russia. In March 2001, Taliban ruler Mullah Muhammad Omar ordered all religious statues smashed, including the seventh-century Great Buddhas of Bamiyan, declaring, “These idols have been gods of the infidels.”

In Turkey and Algeria, elections in the 1990s brought to power Islamic regimes, which were removed by methods other than democratic. In Egypt, Muslim militants have renewed the persecution of Christian Copts. Islamic law has now been imposed on ten northern states in Nigeria.

In Europe, Christian congregations are dying, churches are emptying out, and mosques are filling up. There are five million Muslims in France, and between twelve and fifteen million in the European Union. There are fifteen hundred mosques in German. Islam has replaced Judaism as the second religion of Europe. As the Christian tide goes out in Europe, and Islamic tide comes in. In 2000, for the first time there were more Muslims in the world than Catholics.

While the ideology of “Islamism” has failed in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan to create a modern state that can command the loyalty of its people and serve as a model for other Islamic nations, the religion of Islam has not failed. In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith. Today, it is difficult to find a Western nation where the native population is not dying as it is to find an Islamic nation where the native population is not exploding. The West may have learned what Islam knows not, but Islam remembers what the West has forgotten: “There is no vision but by faith.”

How does one sever a people’s roots? Answer: Destroy its memory. Deny a people the knowledge of who they are and where they came from.

In the Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks imposed on Balkan Christians a blood tax—one boy out of every five. Taken from their parents, the boys were raised as strict Muslims to become the fanatic elite soldiers of the Sultan, the Janissaries, who were then sent back to occupy and oppress the peoples who had borne them. George Orwell in the party slogan of Big Brother gave the formula for erasing memory, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

As Christianity began to die in the West, something else occurred: Western peoples began to stop having children. The correlation between religious faith and large families is absolute. The more devout a people, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the higher its birth rate. In New Square, New York, in the first wholly Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, the average family has ten children. In Kostroma, Russia, Vladimir Alexseyev, father of a poster family of sixteen children, and his pregnant wife have a home full of icons. In the Baptist state of Texas, the birthrate among whites is higher than among white folks in sybarite California. Wherever secularism triumphs, populations begin to shrink and die.

Years ago, when the film The Prophet came out, in which the face of Muhammad was shown, an act of blasphemy to Islam, theaters refused to run it for fear of violent retaliation. When Salman Rushdie published Satanic Verses, a novel judged an obscene insult by Islam; he spent years hiding from the fatwa (Islamic religious decree)., a death sentence imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini. While fatwas and fire bombings are not the American way, Americans must be prepared to live with them.

In 1900 world population was made up of 26.9% Christian and 12.4% Muslim. By 1980 Christians were 30.0% and Muslims 16.5%. When the year 2000 rolled around Christians had dropped to 29.9% while Muslims had increased to 19.2%. Projections are that by the year 2025 Christians will number 25% of the world population and the Muslims, 30%.

Estimates of the total number of Muslims in the world vary greatly:

• 0.700 billion or more, Barnes & Noble Encyclopedia 1993
• 0.817 billion, The Universal Almanac (1996)
• 0.951 billion, The Cambridge Factfinder (1993)
• 1.100 billion, The World Almanac (1997)
• 1.200 billion, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic relations) (1999)

At a level of 1.2 billion, [in1999] Muslims represent between 19.2% and 22% of the world's population. It has become the second largest religion in the world. Christianity has slightly less than 30%.

Islam is growing about 2.9% per year which is faster than the total world population which increases at about 2.3% annually. It is thus attracting a progressively larger percentage of the world's population.

The number of Muslims in North America is in dispute: estimates range from under 3 million to over 6 million. The main cause of the disagreement appears to be over how many Muslim immigrants have converted to Christianity since they arrived in the US.

Statistics Canada reports that 253,260 Canadians identified themselves as Muslims (0.9% of the total population) during the 1991 census. Some estimated that there were as many as 500,000 Muslims in Canada. Today (.2001) there are an estimated 650,000 Muslims in Canada.

Demographics

In the Northwestern Africa between 1965 and 1990, the population rose from 29.8 million to 59 million. During the same period, the number of Egyptians increased from 29.4 million to 52.4 million. In Central Asia, between 1970 and 1993, populations grew at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in Tajikistan, 2.6 percent in Uzbekistan, 2.5 percent in Turkmenistan, and 1.9 percent in Kyrgyzia. In the 1970s, the demographic balance in the Soviet Union shifted drastically, with Muslims increasing by 24 percent while Russians increased by only 6.5 percent.

In countries, such as Tanzania and Macedonia, the Muslims will become a majority within twenty years.

Largely through immigration, the Muslim population of the United States grew sixfold between 1972 and 1990.

Last year, seven percent of babies born in European Union countries were Muslims. In Brussels, the figure was 57 percent. Islam is the second religion of almost every European state - the only exceptions being those European countries such as Azerbaijan and Albania where it is the majority religion.

If current trends continue, then an overall ten percent of European nationals will be Muslim by the year 2020.

Conclusion

If the west's population is top-heavy, (i.e., the ratio of youth to elderly is low) that of Muslim populations is the opposite. For example, today more than half the population of Algeria is under the age of twenty and this situation is similar elsewhere. These young populations will reproduce and perpetuate the increase of Muslims on a percentage basis well into the next millennium.

North America and Europe have increasingly aging populations and one of the most disturbing social issues of the new millennium will concern a more efficient means of disposing of the elderly. (For example, witness the new euthanasia laws in the Netherlands, and the ongoing debate in many countries about this issue.) Medical advances can assure an average life span in the high seventies, although active life spans have not grown as fast. In the early 1900s, a westerner could expect to spend an average of the last two years of life as an invalid. Today, that figure is seven years. Studies have shown medicine prolongs life, but can not prolong mobility nearly as well. Aging populations with their increased healthcare costs are considered a more extensive socio- economic burden to society. The UK Department of Health recently announced that a new prescription drug for Alzheimer's Disease was available on the National Health Service - but its cost meant that it was only available to a small minority of patients. An aging population tends to be introspective and sluggish, whereas a young population is more likely to be vibrant and energetic. This may or may not bode well for many countries depending on whether their political structure is fragile or not.