Islam and Europe’s Future

Europe’s coming demographic crisis and rising Muslim immigrant population has sparked a variety of pessimistic predictions of Europe’s ultimate demise, predicting a time at which Europe’s burgeoning Muslim population will transform the continent into “Eurabia.” George Weigel, author of Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, contradicted this prediction, saying that he believes in a “muddled” outcome, with Sharia-dominated countries mixed among traditional European societies. “Some are going to make it and some are not. It’s very difficult for me, for example…to imagine a future for the Netherlands and Belgium that is not dramatically different…thirty, forty, fifty years from now than it is today,” he said at a recent Ethics and Public Policy Center debate.

Another speaker at the forum, Phillip Jenkins, remains skeptical of arguments predicated on a Muslim demographic surge, arguments which he asserts overlook European’s nascent rediscovery of its own religious heritage. “And then you have people who are rather mainstream people—traditionally would have been very secular—who have reexplored the Christian roots,” said Jenkins. He said “The likelihood is, certainly the way the trends are going at the moment, that [Muslim youth] are also going to decide in a few years that gee, they’re just having so much fun to be bothered to have children.” Jenkins is the author of God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis and teaches History and Religious Studies at Penn State University.

Weigel contradicted Jenkins, noting that “these are not impersonal forces at work, and while it seems clearly the case that the acids of modernity as well as the pleasures of modernity have had a dramatic effect on some Islamic fertility rates, Muslim fertility rates, it clearly hasn’t yet on others.”

Weigel believes that Europe’s current fertility decline, appeasement of radical Muslims, and abrogation of religion stems from a “crisis of civilizational morale.” “A crucial element of the European identity is religion,” he said quoting a speech by Pope Benedict XVI. Ongoing European “appeasement, leads, I think, to the denial of certain core Western political values including the equality of women legally and politically, free speech, and free press. In other words it leads to…‘self-dhimmitude,’ in which native European populations become dhimmi second-class citizens not by conquest but by preemptive acquiescence to what are assumed to be the non-negotiable demands of immigrant communities,” he said.

Weigel similarly exhorted Europeans to admit that “multiculturalism, ghettoization and tolerating enclaves of rule by Sharia offer no real answers to the challenges of large-scale immigration from the Arab Islamic world” in a recent Wall Street Journal Europe column. “A Europe worth respecting would relearn its own historic worth. And having done that, it would stop kowtowing to Islamist blackmail, which is bad for moderate Muslims and lethal for Europe’s future,” Weigel writes.

But Europe’s future is not necessarily lost, said Jenkins. He noted that the continued emphasis on a demographic crisis overlooks Africa’s increasing role in Europe. “What happens when Europe can no longer bring in Muslim immigrants because they’re running out of Algerians?…Well they have to do what they’ve been doing for the last two years, which is they dig deeper and deeper into Africa, where they come up with Christians,” said Jenkins. He continued, “if you go to some of the ‘no-go’ areas, it’s very interesting…the ‘no-go’ areas for white people, there’s a real lot of Christians in those areas.”

One key message brought out by the forum, often overlooked by Western commentators, is that the Muslim religion itself should not be blamed for ongoing extremism, rather a combination of local factors. Many Muslims around the world have diverse means of practicing their religion, but are quickly integrated into the radical Wahhabi mosques within Europe, Jenkins said. Barriers to the establishment of non-Wahhabi mosques which adhere to syncretized and localized traditions further ensure the religious conformity of these communities and hinder social integration.

Unfortunately, the religious “traditions” taught by such Mosques may actually subvert traditional teachings of Islam. “Counterintuitive as it may seem, the Islamists’ call for introduction of Islamic religious law in the West is an innovation, not heard in Europe or the United States before the radicalization of Muslims at the end of the 1970s,” argues Stephen Schwartz in his Weekly Standard article. He explains

However, the ongoing failure of integration efforts remains troubling. Jenkins argues that European citizenship requirements often hinder Islamic integration, especially when they enshrine homosexuality as a core value. “I don’t know how many of you have seen the tests which in German states they’re trying to give to people [to test] whether they can qualify for residence or citizenship, which are popularly known as “Muslim tests,” he said. “And…I’d be prepared to bet that by the standards outlined in those tests, most people in this room presently are radical Islamic fundamentalists because they define basic European values in terms of, for instance, support for gay marriage,” he continued.

However, an excerpt from the Dutch educational video shows that the much-touted homosexual scenes and nudity are only one aspect of integration themes. Other values outlined in the Dutch video include common courtesies, learning the native language, valuing a plurality of ideas, opposing honor killing and female genital mutilation, or tips on how to act at a birthday party.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.

Bethany Stotts