Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: =?UTF-8?Q?The_demographics_of_radical_Islam_(Asia_Times)

Abbastanza agghiacciante. Il testo originale e i  grafici demografici 
possono essere visti qui (spero che non interferiscano con il testo):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH23Aa01.html
Am.￼
The demographics of radical Islam
 By Spengler
(Today)
 General staffs before World War I began war planning with demographic 
tables, calculating how many men of military age they might feed to the 
machine guns. France preferred an early war because its stagnant 
population would not produce enough soldiers a generation hence to 
fight Germany. Only Israel’s general staff looks at demographic tables 
today, to draw prospective boundaries that will enclose a future Jewish 
majority.
 Demographics still provide vital strategic information, albeit in 
quite a different fashion. Today’s Islamists think like the French 
general staff in 1914. Islam has one generation in which to establish a 
global theocracy before hitting a demographic barrier. Islam has enough 
young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25 
million by 2010 - to fight a war during the next 30 years. Because of 
mass migration to Western Europe, the worst of the war might be fought 
on European soil.
 Although the Muslim birth rate today is the world’s second highest 
(after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birth rate of 
any other culture. By 2050, according to the latest UN projections, the 
population growth rate of the Muslim world will ￼converge on that of 
the United States (although it will be much higher than Europe's or 
China's). 
 Falling fertility measures the growing influence of modernity upon the 
Muslim world. Literacy rates, especially female literacy, best explain 
the difference between the very high fertility rates of pre-modern 
society and the moderate fertility rates of industrial countries, as I 
showed in a recent study (Death by secularism: The statistical 
evidence, August 1, 2005).
 This is clearly the case in the Muslim world where the lowest rates of 
adult literacy correspond to the ￼highest population growth rate. 
Literacy alone explains 58% of the variation in birth rates among 
Muslim countries. 
 Urbanization, literacy, and openness to the modern world ultimately 
will suppress the Muslim womb, in the absence of radical measures. In a 
new volume of essays on modern Islamic thought, the Islamists Suha 
Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi observe, “Rather than being a 
development within cultural traditions that is internally generated, 
20th century Islamic thought is constitutively responsive; it is 
substantially a reaction to extrinsic challenges.” [1] The challenge 
stems from the transformation of Muslim life:
In the Middle East of 1900, for example, less than 10% of the 
inhabitants were city dwellers; by 1980, 47% were urban. In 1800, Cairo 
had a population of 250,000, rising to 600,000 by the beginning of the 
20th century. The unprecedented influx of immigrants from rural areas 
brought the population of Cairo to almost 8 million by 1980. Massive 
urbanization altered patterns of living, of housing and architecture, 
of the human relation with space and land, of marketing, employment, 
and consumption, and the very structure of family and social hierarchy. 
[2]
The sharp fall in the Muslim population growth rate expresses the 
extreme fragility of traditional society. Translated into the Islamist 
vocabulary (citing again Taji-Farouki and Nafi), this means that:
A Muslim sense of vulnerability and outrage is further exacerbated by 
the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of American popular culture and 
modes of consumerism and the transparent hypocrisy of the American 
rhetoric of universal rights and liberties. It is also stoked by 
Western ambivalence towards economic disparities in the world. [3]
Rapid urbanization, to be sure, produced growing pains in every case on 
record. Britain transported its displaced population to America and 
then to Australia, including the “clearing” of entire Scots villages 
forced onto ships for Canada. But Britain’s urbanization coincided with 
rapid economic growth and improving living standards. The Arab world’s 
urbanization has only created a stagnant pool of urban poor. As the 
London Economist summarized in the United Nations Arab Development 
Report for 2002:
One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And over the past 
20 years growth in income per head, at an annual rate of .5%, was lower 
than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this 
rate, says the report, it will take the average Arab 140 years to 
double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less 
than 10 years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, 
means vanishing jobs. About 12 million people, or 15% of the labor 
force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could 
rise to 25 million by 2010. [4]
Excluding Indonesia, the Muslim’s world literacy rate stands at only 
53%, against 81% for China; Arab literacy is only 50%. Only 1% of the 
population owns a personal computer. It is delusional to believe that 
the Arab world, which now exports (net of oil) as much as Finland, 
might come to compete with China, India and the rest of Asia in the 
global market for goods and services.
 Just as the Muslim population peaks, the one bounty that nature has 
bestowed upon the Arabs, namely oil, will begin to diminish. According 
to the US Department of Energy, conventional oil  ￼production will peak 
just before 2050 at the present 2% rate of production growth. 
 In short, the Muslim world half a century from now can expect the 
short end of the stick from the modern world. It has generated only two 
great surpluses, namely people and oil. By the middle of the century 
both of these will have begun to dwindle. But at the moment it has 25 
million idle young men. No leader can remain in power who does not give 
them a destination to march to.
 By no means does that imply that all of these 25 million will become 
suicide bombers, but a great many of them are likely to emigrate to 
Europe, including Eastern Europe, where populations are stagnant and 
about to decline. A Muslim takeover of Western Europe surely is a 
possible outcome.
Notes
 [1] Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M. Nafi, Islamic Thought in the 
Twentieth Century (Tauris: London 2004), p 9
 [2] Ibid, p 2
 [3] Op cit, p 14
 [4] Economist, July 4, 2002
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 possible outcome.
Qui, ci deve essere una politica concertata da parte degli stati a 
limitare l'influenza degli integralisti e degli intolleranti.
E una politica di proselitismo delle chiese cristiane verso i mussulmani.
Già adesso, moltissimi mussulmani emigrati di prima o seconda 
generazione, abbandonano l'Islam per altre fedi o per l'ateismo.
Quello che limita l'implosione dell'Islam è la mancanza di protezione 
che gli apostati ricevono, il timore che molti di questi hanno di venire 
allo scoperto o di convertirsi ufficialmente.
Si calcola che solo nel UK la percentuale di "mussulmani solo sulla 
carta" sia del 20%.
Se la politica degli stati permettesse a questi di emergere e di 
manifestare liberamente il loro pensiero, allora le prospettive 
sarebbero molto differenti.
Mirco