Islam: A Critical Look at Contemporary Issues

By Vexen Crabtree 2006 +

UK4.8% of the population of England & Wales are Muslims (and rising)

How many Muslims are there?

  • 44 countries are over 50% Muslim1.

  • 1.6 billion Muslims in 2010 (23.4% of the world): 2.2 billion by 2030 (26.4%)2.

  • 6% of Europe was Muslim, in 2011. Will rise to 8% in 20302.

Population growth in the world is highest amongst the poor and the uneducated. Muslims have a disproportionate share of such people3, so their numbers are rising. Factors such as war and instability in the Middle East keep the reproduction rate higher.

The Muslim world is slowly aging. "In 1990 Islam's share of the world's youth was 20%; in 2010, 26%. In 2030 it will be 29% (of 15-29-year-olds)". But on average, Muslims are starting to age. "The media age in Muslim-majority countries was 19 in 1990. It is 24 now, and will be 30 by 2030. (For French, Germans and Japanese the figure is 40 or over.) This suggests Muslim numbers will ultimately stop climbing, but later than the rest of the population"2.

Moral Failures

Abraham's Attempted Sacrifice of His Son Isaac: Genesis 22:1-18 and Qur'an 37:99-113 Islam and WomenThe Battle Between Monotheism and Homosexuality: 3. IslamAnimal Sacrifice and Blood Rituals in Traditional World Religions and Satanism: Islam is an example of a religion with detailed rituals involving animal sacrifice

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By Vexen Crabtree 2006 +
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/islam.html

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References: (What's this?)

Book Cover

The Koran. Translation by N. J. Dawood. Penguin Classics edition published by Penguin Group Ltd, London, UK. First published 1956, quotes taken from 1999 edition.

Cesari, Jocelyne
When Islam and Democracy Meet (2004). Published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York, USA.

EUMC. Published by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Vienna, Austria.
Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia (2006).

Lunde, Paul
Islam: A brief history (2003). Revised edition. First published in UK 2002 by Dorling Kindersley Publishers Ltd, London, UK.

Footnotes

  1. Lunde (2003) p8.^
  2. 2011 and 2030 stats from The Economist (2011 Jan 29) p58. The article references "The Future of the Global Muslim Population" produced by the Pew Research Centre. The EUMC reported in 2006 in Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia p8, that the European Muslim population was around 13 million, around 3.5 percent of the total population of the European Union, based on a sum of country data, some of which are unofficial data & estimates.^
  3. Cesari (2004) p23-25.^

© 2013 Vexen Crabtree. All rights reserved.

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