[LINK] The Financial Times on EU Muslims

[rfmcdonald]

The Financial Times has an ongoing series of articles examining MUslims in Europe, particularly Muslims in the European Union. Two articles in this series are of note.

• First, "Head count belies vision of ‘Eurabia’" takes a look at the idea of a Muslim conquest of Europe through numbers and finds it sorely lacking.

Jytte Klausen, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies European Muslims, says: “It’s being advocated by people who don’t consult the numbers. All these claims are really emotional claims.” Sometimes they are made by Muslim or far-right groups, who share an interest in exaggerating the numbers.

Nominal Muslims – whether religious or not – account for 3-4 per cent of the European Union’s total population of 493m. Their percentage should rise, but far more modestly than the extreme predictions. That is chiefly because Muslims, both in Europe and the main “emigrating countries” of Turkey and north Africa, are having fewer babies.

“Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe,” says Ms Klausen. Few European states ask citizens about religious beliefs. Estimates based on national origins suggest that 16m nominal Muslims live in the EU. There are about 5m in France, 3.3m in Germany and 1.5m-2m in the UK.

“Berlin is a Muslim city, Paris is a Muslim city, and even Madrid or Turin to some degree,” Jocelyn Cesari, an expert on European Muslims at Harvard University, has said.

The EU’s most Islamic country is Bulgaria, where 1m Muslims account for about one-seventh of the population.

But the birth-rates of Europe’s Muslim immigrants, though still above the EU’s average, are falling. The fertility rate of north African women in France has been dropping since 1981, say Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse in their book Integrating Islam. “The longer immigrant women live in France, the fewer children they have; their fertility rate approaches that of native-born French women.”

At the last count Algerian women living in France averaged an estimated 2.57 children, against 1.94 for French women overall.

The decline in birth-rates is more dramatic in north Africa itself. Women there use contraceptives more and have babies later than they did. In Algeria and Morocco 35 years ago, the average woman had seven children. According to the United Nations, it is now 2.5 in Algeria (about the same as Turkey), 2.8 in Morocco, and falling in all of them. The US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook has even lower estimates of Algerian, Tunisian and Turkish birth-rates: below France’s rate and below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Emigrating countries are no longer exporting high birth rates to Europe.

• Second, "Religious fault line divides Europeans" provides finer detail on attitudes in different European countries towards Islam and religion generally, as well as towards individual Muslims.

An overwhelming majority of French people regard Muslim immigrants as French, see them as suitable marriage partners for children and do not consider them threats to security. This may seem surprising less than two years after the riots in French suburbs and three years after France banned Muslim headscarves from schools.

But Patrick Simon, a demographer at Ined demographic institute in Paris, said the riots of November 2005 had not been Islamist revolts against France. Rather, the main grievances were economic and against the police. “There was a social motor, not a religious motor,” he said.

Fewer than a quarter of Spaniards saw the presence of Muslims as a threat to national security or thought Muslims had too much political power. Only a fifth said they would object to their child marrying a Muslim.

The US prides itself on integrating immigrants more successfully than European countries. However, 40 per cent of Americans with children said they would object to their children marrying Muslims. Mr Bleich suggested this might be because more Americans than Europeans belonged to churches. “If you asked someone in an evangelical church, ‘Would you object if your child married a Catholic?’ you might get quite high numbers too.”

A third of Italians and Germans, and 46 per cent of Britons felt Muslims had too much political power. Of the British figure, Mr Bleich said: “That radically over- estimates the amount of power Muslims have.” Only four of 646 members of parliament are Muslims, and Muslims had failed to change Britain’s Iraq policy.

The poll’s methodology weighted the sample for factors such as age and gender but not for religious belief, and the number of self-declared Muslim respondents appears low. In France, Muslims are thought to represent 8-9 per cent of the population. In Germany and the UK, the figure is closer to 3-4 per cent. But self-declared Muslims represented only 1 per cent of the respondents in these three countries.