Thursday, April 03, 2008
Are there actually a lot of former Muslims?
Andfrew Walden has written a fascinating essay that claims that believers are abandoning Islam for Christianity or secularism "in droves," notwithstanding the presumably highly variable risk to life and limb of doing so.
[Magdi] Allam, author of numerous books and deputy editor of Milan’s Corriere della Sera, joins a list of converts from Islam which includes many other public intellectuals and millions of average people from all over the world. This is more than the normal flow between two large religious communities. Islam can point to little in the way of recent conversions. Its claim to be the world’s fastest-growing religion stems mostly from the high birth rate in Islamic countries, whose infant mortality rates have been cut by the introduction of Western medicine. Christian growth is based on adult conversion. As leading Christian evangelist Wolfgang Simpson writes, “More Muslims have come to Christ in the last two decades than in all of history.”
Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000. One Iranian religious scholar believes youth are abandoning Islam because it is identified with the corrupt Iranian government. Now the Iranian Majlis (parliament) is debating the death penalty for conversion. [Emphasis added, links available in the original. - ed.]
Suppose it is true that Islam is suffering defections at higher than the usual rate. Will there be geopolitical consequences? Will they be stabilizing, or destabilizing? Will the defections make Islamists more desperate, or inspire a reform movement within Islam that will finally integrate that religion with the constructs of modernity? Or, alternatively, will the defections evaporate the moderates from Islam, leaving behind a distillate of extremism?
Release the hounds.
6 Comments:
By 
Eric, at
Thu Apr 03, 01:01:00 PM:
I think I have to take that with a grain of salt. There are no hard numbers and a bunch of anecdotes.
It may be happening, but then again, it may not be.
By 
, at
Thu Apr 03, 03:28:00 PM:
Since there is no real census with private answers the trend may be difficult to prove one way or another. However it is indeed mood elevating to read that it is quite possible that islam is in decline in terms of numbers. And perception may be half the battle here, which is after all a battle for minds as a proxy to souls.
Viewed in the context of islam declining, Bin Laden's desire to produce "miracles" by the defeat of two superpowers and thus establish islam as the stronger horse makes sense as an act of desperation. A defeat of America by a petrodollar fueled resurgent islam would make a potent recruitment tool among the young.
Which, of course, is yet another critical reason we cannot allow that to happen.
-- DaMav
By jj mollo, at
Fri Apr 04, 01:44:00 AM:
Even if it is happening, it doesn't matter much because Muslims are reproducing at a faster rate. It's one of their weapons against us.
By , at
Fri Apr 04, 01:50:00 PM:
A couple of notes:
1.
Quote: One estimate suggests that as many as 15 per cent of Muslims in Western societies have lost their faith, which would mean that in Britain there are about 200,000 apostates.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article510589.ece
2.
Although your post didn't mention this fact, but after Magdi Allam's conversion, many implied that the Pope provoked Islam, and that this conversion should have been hidden.
So the leader of one of the world's biggest religion converted somebody to his religion in the center of his religion on the most important day in his religion. And this should have been hidden?
It means that many Europeans are already follow Islam. They might be not Muslims, but they follow Islam. Islam means submission, and they obviously observe Muslim traditions (let me not cite a lot of other examples).
3.
For the sake of this note, let's treat atheism and agnosticism as religion.
We often hear that Islam is the Religion of Peace. Not as an irony but as a serious argument.
David Hicks, Richard Reid, John Lindh Walker, Muriel Degauque, Adam Gadahn, etc.
These are people who converted from any religion (sans Islam) to Islam in order to commit crimes or to incite others to commit crimes in the name of their new religion.
Can anyone show me an opposite example? Where anybody converted from any religion (including Islam) to any other religion (excluding Islam) in order to commit crimes in the name of their new religion?
If nobody can come up with as many people in the second group as in the first, then this will put the argument, that Islam is the Religion of Peace, to the rest.
As a bonus question, anybody knows about any ex-Muslim, who converted away from Islam in order to commit crimes in the name of his new (non-Islamic) religion?
Vilmos
By , at
Tue Apr 08, 04:06:00 PM:
Here are some examples: Joe Stalin abandoined Orthodox Christianity for athiesm in order to launch his career as a mass-murderer. Hitler presumably was a Protestant who abandoned his faith in order to found the nazi military religion and commit mass murder. Mao presumably was raised with some kind of buddhism or Chinese belief system. he abandoned it for athiesm and murdered millions.
I know of no example where anybody adopted Christianity, Judiasm, or Buddhism and from that got justification for mass murder.
By Snake Oil Baron, at
Sun Apr 13, 06:52:00 AM:
The demographic advantage is also stalling. Most Islamic nations are moving well into the demographic transition where the population goes from high death and high birth rates to low death and high birth rates (rapid expansion) to low death and low birth rates. It is not readily apparent yet since their populations are still young and in their reproductive years and their fertility rates are still higher than replacement levels (even this is not universal). Literacy is comparatively low in the much of the Islamic world but it's continued rise, combined with a developing non-oil economy and rapid urbanization are having the same effect on them as they do on everyone else. Iran is already well below replacement fertility and many of the Middle East nations with higher than replacement rates have seen their rates decline from far higher rates in the recent past.
Even immigrant fertility rates tend to move toward those of the host nation over a couple of generations though their nations of origin often see faster declines.
