Myths about Muslims proved wrong

“The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!”
This used to be the battle cry and anti-Muslim euphoria gripping Europe and the U.S. as aftermath of 9/11 started to sink in.
Lot of generalizations have been made about Muslims, popular misconception among them being that about the effects of Islamic immigration, the beliefs, activities and growth rates of these new arrivals. Writers, authors and commentators have been advocating frighteningly common theme that the Muslims were invading the West and that due to their high birthrate and religious beliefs, they would take over western countries.
It was claimed that Europe was especially at risk with the invasion of immigrants who would transform Europe into “Eurabia.” The term denotes a conspiracy theory aimed to Islamize and Arabise Europe. A leading Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, told the Wall Street Journal in 2005 “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in physical sense, but also in mental and cultural sense.”

It was also claimed that Muslims reproduce at an unusually rapid pace and they may become a majority in European and North American cities. The west was afraid that the “Muslim tide” might permanently alter the west, promoting a political agenda that will destroy their traditions and freedoms. Several claims against Muslims were made including that by 2050, some of the cities in western countries will be unrecognizable. Many started believing that boulevards will have halal butcheries and hookah bars while street signs in Berlin will be in Turkish, French children will read Quranic verses in schools and women will put on veils.
But a dynamic book written and researched by Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief of The Globe and Mail, has placed all these myths to rest by debunking these popular misconceptions in ” The myth of the Muslim tide.” Saunders, who stresses that his book is not a defence of Islam, has done a great service to everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, by proving that the myth of the Muslim tide is wrong and that the immigrants do not threaten the west.
Saunders who also claims that he is not an admirer of Islam points at Muslim myths and counters them logically in his book.
 • Muslims breed like rats.
The Muslim population of the European Union, which also included non-members Switzerland and Norway, was 18.2 million in 2010, or 4.5 per cent. By 2030, it is estimated to be 29.8 million — 7.1 per cent. By 2050, it would reach 10 per cent. That’s according to three authoritative studies.

In the U.S., the Muslim population was estimated at 2.6 million in 2010. It is expected to increase to 6.2 million or 1.7 per cent by 2030 — as numerous as Jews and Episcopalians.

The Muslim population in Canada is predicted to triple over the same period from 940,000 to 2.7 million.
Saunders says it is wrong to claim that a majority of immigrants to Europe are and will be Muslims. “If the West is being overwhelmed at all, it is not by Muslims,” he says. Spain, which is adjacent to the Arab world, receives a majority of its immigrants from Romania or from the other side of the Atlantic. Only 28 per cent of immigrants in Britain are Muslim. “If a religious group is taking over in the U.K., it is Catholics.”
Less than 15 per cent of immigrants in Germany are Muslim and a far larger group comes from Eastern Europe.
The only European country with the largest Muslim immigrant group is France, mainly because many were French citizens a generation ago, when Algeria and Tunisia were French territories.
While acknowledging that some countries with highest birth rates are Muslims, Saunders concludes that these countries produce very little immigration to Europe. The immigrants who arrive in Europe soon conform to European fertility rates.
According to the French demographers Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, there is no tie between Islamic beliefs and fertility rates and that Muslim countries are facing one of the rates of fertility decline in history.
Saunders contends that globalization and immigration “are not Islamifying the west, rather they are modernizing the Islamic countries that send immigrants westward.”
* Muslim immigrants are not loyal to their host countries.
A Gallup survey undertaken in 2009 of opinions held by European countries found that “British Muslims are more likely than all populations surveyed to identify strongly with their nation, and to express stronger confidence in its democratic process.” The survey showed 77 percent of British Muslims said they identified “extremely strongly” or “very strongly” with their country versus only 50 percent of Britons, 52 percent of French Muslims and 40 percent of German Muslims.
In 2011, the London research organization, Demos, found that “overall, British Muslims are more likely to be both patriotic and optimistic about Britain than are the white British community.”

* Muslim immigrants want to live apart, in isolated “parallel societies.”
In the 11 European cities studied by the Open Society Institute, Muslims “are not integrated into the mainstream labour market.” Muslims face joblessness, lower pay and greater vulnerability to layoffs. Saunders notes that poverty afflicts all visible minorities who come to the West as unskilled, semiskilled or working class laboureres.
In Canada, Saunders points out “a major analysis of national statistics found that skin colour, not religion, affects the ability to integrate.
” Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists experience more disadvantage both objectively in terms of household income and subjectively in terms of reported discrimination and vulnerability….Overall, it seems clear that that religion, particularly Islam, is not a decisive factor affecting social integration …If anything, South Asian and Arab and West Asian Muslims report somewhat higher levels of integration than co-ethnics in other religions.”

* Muslims in the West tend to be angry at the society around them.
Admittedly, extremists protesting cartoon of Prophet Mohammed or suicide bombers’ messages express a total and uncontrollable rage at Western secular society, but is this rage felt by large number of Muslims?
According to a survey done, Muslims in America are more likely to be “satisfied with their lives” (84 percent of foreign born Muslims) than average Americans (75 percent.) The satisfaction rate rises to 90 percent for second generation Muslims.

Saunders says it is inevitable that religious Muslims would want like Christians and Jews to establish arbitration services. On the contrary, majority of American Christians want laws to be based on the Ten Commandments. The few Muslims who do use sharia, in Britain and the U.S., do so for religious arbitration in personal and business matters, just as Christians and Jews do.
In conclusion, Saunders emphatically says that these and other claims are “demonstrably untrue. The Muslim-tide hypothesis on the whole has no merit . . . The idea of a stealth takeover by Islamic believers is a delusion.”
Saunders points out that what is being said about Muslims today is what was once said about Catholics and Jews in the 19th and early part of the 20th century. Both groups were also accused of being religiously motivated aliens incapable of integration and hell-bent on changing society.
“We have forgotten how alarming the waves of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants from the fringes of Europe appeared to North Americans and Western Europeans only a few decades ago.
“Their home countries seemed less democratic, less economically free, and more prone to religious law and political extremism. Right up through the early 1950s, it was commonplace for thinkers across the political spectrum to argue that Catholic immigrants were driven by the dictates of their faith to promote fascism, violence and religious extremism, and therefore could not be assimilated into non-Catholic cultures.
“By the end of the 20th century, though, most people had forgotten about their earlier fears of religious minorities…
“Muslim immigrants are no more ‘different’ and no more threatening than earlier larger waves of religious minorities who contribute to the current populations of most Western countries,” Saunders explains.
Saunders says western values and institutions are not so fragile that they will be shattered by the arrival of a few dissenting outsiders. We should have faith in the strengths and inherent virtues of our common institutions; they have been resilient and successful enough to absorb far larger and far more divergent groups of newcomers in the past.”