An extensive new report on the growth of the world’s Muslim population should put to rest a lot of fears
Anxious commentators have made sweeping predictions that Canada will have a Muslim prime minister in a decade as a result of high Muslim immigration and birth rates
Other scare mongers have predicted Europe will be 40 per cent Muslim by 2030, and thus be largely governed by oppressive Shariah law. Europe, say these worried forecasters, might as well now be called “Eurabia.”
However, the respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a major report today, titled The Future of the Global Muslim Population, that debunks all these extremist projections, including regarding Canada.
The non-partisan Pew Forum’s army of researchers, mostly academics from scores of countries, project that Muslims will, indeed, grow in relative size in the next two decades – expanding to 26.4 per cent of the world’s population by 2030, a modest rise from the current 23.4 per cent.
The Pew Forum’s 209-page report, coordinated in the U.S., also acknowledges that Muslims do generally have higher birthrates than the rest of the world’s population. But not to the extent many fear.
What does it predict for Canada
That the Muslim population of this country will triple by 2030, to 2.7 million.
That in two decades Canada will have the second highest number of Muslims in all of North and South America, behind the United States and ahead of Argentina.
Indeed, the Pew Forum forecasts that 6.6 per cent of the Canadian population will be Muslim by 2030, a jump from the current 2.8 per cent.
That means Canada will have a much higher percentage of Muslims than will the U.S. (where Muslims will make up only 1.7 per cent of the population) and Argentina (where they will account for 2.6 per cent of all residents).
The biggest Muslim source countries for Canada in the future are expected to be Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Algeria.
The prospect of Canada having 2.7 million Muslims (such as the Metro Vancouver Muslims in photo left) represent a massive change compared to prior to 1961, when Canada only had 1,000 foreign-born Muslims. But the Pew figures don’t add up to a looming Muslim takeover of the country.
Similarly, there is no doubt that Islam is on the rise in Europe, but not in runaway fashion.
The Pew Forum report projects that Europe will be eight per cent Muslim by 2030, a rise from six per cent today.
That will hardly turn Europe into “Eurabia,” nor lead to the inevitable destruction, as many have worried, of the so-called European way of life.
Indeed, the Pew Forum projects that the world’s five largest Muslim countries will soon be outside the Arab countries of the Middle East.
The Pew Forum projects in 20 years there will be 256 million Muslims in Pakistan, 238 million in Indonesia, 236 million in India, 187 million in Bangladesh and 116 million in Nigeria. The most Islamic Middle Eastern country will be Egypt, with 105 million Muslims.
Even though the world’s Muslim growth rates will not be anywhere near as strong as the opponents of Islam have warned, the Pew Forum report does confirm that Muslim birth rates are expected to remain higher than the average.
For instance, the Pew Forum’s global survey confirms the earlier results of a 2010 Statistics Canada report, which showed that Canadian Muslims average 2.4 children per woman, compared to 1.6 children per woman for the rest of the population.
Why are Muslims tending to have more babies? The Pew report says it’s because of regional cultural traditions, because they have a higher percentage of women who are of child-bearing age and because many live in developing countries that are rapidly improving their health and economic conditions.
But rapid Muslim birth rates are not necessarily going to continue. The Pew Forum notes that Islamic birth rates have been declining in recent decades and will keep on doing so.
Muslim birth rates are “dropping primarily due to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries, including such populous nations as Indonesia and Bangladesh,” says the Pew report.
“Fertility is dropping as more women in these countries obtain a secondary education, living standards rise and people move from rural areas to cities and towns.”
The Pew Forum report, funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, has done everyone a favour by taking the debate about the future of the global Muslim population out of the hands of fear-mongers -- and putting it into a realistic perspective.

Click here for earlier pieces on Muslim demographics, including "When it comes to fertility fears, Muslims are the new Catholics"

Source:  http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2011/01/26/despite-fears-muslims-will-grow-only-modestly-in-world-and-canada.aspx