The global Muslim population

The web and blogging are simply fantastic when it comes to getting updates, discussing policies, ..... Many academics have also taken up blogging big time.  I suspect that in many cases, blogging provides a lot more interactive discussions than a journal article can.  Juan Cole is one of those academics who has blogged a lot--on the Middle East in particular.  Here, he responds to the news item that a quarter of the world's population is Muslim:

I don't think most people in the West realize the implications of the likelihood that one-third of humankind may soon be Muslim. We don't have a real sense of scale in the US. We don't realize that Brazil alone is nearly as big as the US in area, or that the US could be fitted into East Africa. We don't realize how huge Iran is, or what it implies when we call India a subcontinent.

One of the implications is that the US is a little unlikely to thrive as a superpower in the 21st century if its more venal and bloodthirsty politicians go on barking about "Islamo-fascism" (they never said Christo-Fascism even though Gen. Franco in Spain was a good candidate for the label) and denigrating Islam and Muslims and seeking to militarily occupy their countries and siphon off their resources. That kind of behavior may have worked in the 19th century before Muslims were mobilized, but it does not work now.

The Muslim world is the labor pool of the next century, and is also the custodian of much of the world's fuel. New American crusades of the sort favored on the right of the Republican Party may finally induce imperial overstretch and deeply harm the US. Some 5 percent of the population cannot dominate by force 25 percent of the globe and what may eventually be 33% of the globe.

You know, I would never have guessed that there are an estimated 16 million Muslims in Russia.  HT

Islamophobia, and Eurabia

A British Minister walks out of a Muslim constituent’s wedding protesting against segregation of male and female guests; a prominent moderate Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, is hounded out of not one but two separate jobs for hosting a show on an Iranian television channel; aggressive right-wing campaigners in Switzerland demand removal of minarets from all mosques; and French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for a ban on wearing burqa in public.

These incidents, occurring within days of each other in recent weeks in different parts of Europe, have coincided with a rash of new books portraying European Muslims in the darkest possible colour. Their alarmist tone has reminded many of the sort of things once written about European Jews.

Are these simply isolated events? Or is Europe in the grip of a new wave of Islamophobia?

A well-thought out essay by Hasan Suroor, who alerts readers about the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, and in North America. It is not looking good.
Suroor concludes that:

It would be foolish to conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy. Yet to dismiss them as an aberration would be to deny the prejudice that Muslims face across Europe.