A Crime to Shave

Forecast Sees Muslim Population Levelling Off

A new report forecasts that the number of Muslims around the world will grow over the next 20 years at twice the rate of non-Muslims, but that the rapid growth will level off. With more Muslim women now getting educations and jobs, people migrating to other cities, and living standards improving, the report says, the birth-rate in majority-Muslim countries will come to more closely resemble the pattern in other nations.

Predictions that Europe will become a majority-Muslim “Eurasia” are unfounded, according to the report by the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group.

Muslims in Europe only made up 6 per cent of the population in 2010, and will only grow to around 8 per cent by 2030, In France and Belgium; Muslims will be about 10 per cent of the population in 20 years, and in England, 5 per cent. And only 8 per cent counting in Scotland and Wales

Globally, Muslims only make up a mere 23.4 per cent of the population, and if current trends continue, will still only be 26.4 per cent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be well over 30 per cent up to 40 per cent and rising at a much higher rate than Muslims.

The London Times speaking with Sir Michael Black-Feather the English first minister and nearly appointed Archbishop to the church of Michael the Archangel England this January said; “There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, England,” he said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’ve been looking at all this for some time and wondering, where is all the hysteria coming from?”

I know in the United States, the report found about 2.6 million Muslims in 2010, a number projected to rise to 6.2 million in 20 years. (The 2.6 million figure is far lower than the numbers claimed by some American Muslim groups, but not out of line with some previous studies.) At that rate of growth, Muslims would still be a religious minority in 2030, only 1.7 per cent of the American population about the same equivalent of Jews in the United States today and the Christian faiths out number both by around 3 to1?.

Peter Mandaville, the director of the Centre for Global Studies at George Mason University and the author of “Global Political Islam,” said: “Over time, there will be a diminution of the Muslim youth bulge, but we’re at the crisis level of it now. As events in Tunisia and Egypt have shown, the number of under-30s who are un- or underemployed is still enormous, and the possibility of that youth bulge producing political and economic tension is still very present and is mainly down to unemployment as they have nothing else better to do.”

By 2030, Pakistan will have the largest Muslim population, surpassing Indonesia, and Nigeria will surpass Egypt.

The report suggests that economic and educational factors affect population growth rates among Muslims far more than the religious factor. In Iran, which encourages family planning and birth control, the fertility rate of only 1.7 children per woman resembles that of many European countries. It has the lowest fertility rate of any Muslim-majority nation, while Niger, a poor African nation, has the highest, at 6.9 children per woman. Iranian girls receive 15 years of schooling on average; in Niger, it is four years. The Taliban also have made it a crime to shave a beard which should show you all just what a bunch of nut-cases your dealing with? A Crime to Shave can anyone tell us where it says or ever has that God doesn’t want you to shave?