Posted on 01/26/2011 10:05:07 PM PST by lbryce
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 getting educations and jobs, people migrating to cities, and living standards improving, the report says, the birthrate in majority-Muslim countries will come to more closely resemble the pattern in other nations.
Predictions that Europe will become a majority-Muslim Eurabia are unfounded, according to the report by the Pew Research Centers Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group.
Muslims in Europe made up only 6 percent of the population in 2010, and will grow to 8 percent by 2030, the report says. In France and Belgium, Muslims will be about 10 percent of the population in 20 years, and in Britain, 8 percent.
Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the worlds religious balance, experts said. The worlds Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.
Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims.
Theres this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, theyre going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States, she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why are you spreading leftist relativism on Islam?
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