Fear Mongering Over Muslims???

Muslim Take Over? No.

Official and independent figures for immigration show that the claims made by right-wing groups are wrong when they suggest that the United Kingdom will be over run by Islam, they often say “By 2030 the UK will be mostly Muslim.”, even though the evidence is by 2040 they may well be level with Christian in the UK.

The mistake is that many figures expressed on facebook and twitter are made to fit far-right politics, so the average guys reads a story on facebook and parrots this on twitter or in a forum, the “Majority.” claim is completely false, and is not fact based, the rate of increase between 2001 and 2011 was massive, the Muslim community increased by one million people, much of this is due to birth rates. The figures for Muslims in the UK in 2001 were at 1.6 million people, this reached 2.7 million by 2011, for arguments sake we may be able to say that over 3 million Muslims live in the UK by 2016. For this rate of increase to become to majority will take decades, far more than two or three, and the Christian population is shrinking, the non-believers are becoming a larger chunk of the UK population every year, indeed some figure suggest over a quarter of the UK is non-religious.

So even if the Christian population remained static at about 30 million people from any form of the Christian faith, for that 3 million Muslims to become 30 million, if doubling every ten years, will take over 30 years, in reality an increase of over half per decade means that it will be much longer, and much longer still considering population increases to the Christians, and other communities, to be the majority in the UK will take far longer than that. If this doubling idea with the Muslim community repeated as a standard increase decade on decade, then it would still take an extremely long period, maybe a century, for Islam to over take the rest.

It's worth noting that most Muslims are not a great danger to all you hold dear, strong law and order will keep criminals of every community in order, educating the population that we should respect free choice can iron out many of our differences, and not treating any community unfairly will limit a sense of victimisation, which can be the problem Muslim face with the unclear media and biases in the tabloid press. One comparison between crimes and a people is that of Catholics, there are over four million Roman Catholics, and there have been many cases of paedophiles in the Priesthood, and yet, no one in their right mind would say the average Catholic is pro-child rape. With the Muslim Community, globally, there are more Muslims than Catholics, the Catholic population is about a billion people, the Muslim population is 1.8 billion people, although figures vary, and in my opinion, it is not fair to compare Muslims in the UK to the highly politically charged events of the third world and radicalism of the Middle East.

It is unreasonable to compare many millions of Muslims to suicide bombers just because they were born into a family of Muslims, since the figures for Muslim suicide bombers accounts for over four thousand attackers, from Syria to Indonesia, from Afghanistan to Nigeria, and out of a diverse religion that has many schools of thought and no strict unity, even within the biggest sect, the Sunni, a hand full are not representative. Consider the Rivalry between Muslim nations, how different perspectives cause divides between Sunni nations, how different powers, such as Saudi Arabia, use religion as a tool to extend influence beyond political boarders, Islam in that way is not unlike Christianity, there are many shades within the faith. The main difference may be that Muslims often claim the Quran is the perfect word of god, so interpretation doesn't make sense, so many schools of thought have differing methods of selecting verses, some cling to the peaceful ones, other insist the verses relating to holy war and martyrdom are more important and relevant. In this way, the Muslim faith is divided, mean that for one to compare Muslims to suicide bombers you must be specific about which ones, what is their deeper ideology. This is often where people confuse the issues, since politics and religion are more often than not locked together, political religious views are both religious and political by definition, it's apologetics to say radical Muslims are not Muslim, and just as unrealistic to call it purely religious,since the action upon a belief in the political arena makes it political.

We should be sceptical of such claims about any community, and fact check as much as we can, avoid being carried by emotionality, avoid being driven by bias elements of the media, and try to not be impulsive when we read only half of the facts. This still means we can be doubtful, very doubtful of Islam, and keep secular principles close, but be fair in this multi-cultural society. 

[a first draft]