Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…What’s your projection for the long-run percentage of Muslims in Western Europe? This is much debated. You hear a lot of exaggerated claims that by year X — fill in the blank — they’ll be more than half the population. What should we actually think and why? I don’t think we’re going to head to much more than about 20, 25 at the most, percent. There’s a number of reasons I say that. Number one, even if the European population consisted only of immigrants, if the immigration flow is only minority Muslim — I think the average is only about 20, 25 percent — then that’s going to be your population. The other thing is, the birth rates for Muslims are really not that different, including if we go into the Muslim world, particularly the Arab world. The birth rates have really come down dramatically in the last two decades. Added to that is that intermarriage is a route through which Muslims or their children lose religion. I’ve looked at individual-level census data in this country, where we can see that the offspring of people who are part, say, Pakistani or Arab and part white British — that kind of person, between 2001 and 2011, had quite a high chance of moving from saying, “I’m a Muslim,” to saying, “I have no religion.” There are certain groups, like the Bosnians, who have a quite high, I would say, a kind of fall-off from religion. There’s secularization potential through intermarriage, and also the immigration flow is just not Muslim enough to produce this majority. So I don’t think it’ll ever be more than about 20, 25 percent. Which group of French Muslims has assimilated most successfully and why?…

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