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[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

be fruitful + multiply

         
 
  
                  
          

The world's lowest fertility rates, measured by number of children born per 
woman.
Armenia    1.10
Latvia    1.10
Bulgaria    1.10
Ukraine    1.10
Spain    1.13
Slovenia    1.14
Russian Federation    1.14
Czech Republic    1.16
China    1.17
Belarus    1.20
Estonia    1.20
Hungary    1.20
Italy    1.20
Source: The New York Times Almanac, 2004

Eurabia?
By NIALL FERGUSON
Published: April 4, 2004

n the 52nd chapter of his ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' Edward 
Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the 
French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of 
Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam?

''Perhaps,'' speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ''the 
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, 
and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and 
truth of the revelation of Mahomet.''


When those words were published in 1788, the idea of a Muslim Oxford could 
scarcely have seemed more fanciful. The last Muslim forces had been driven 
from Spain in 1492; the Ottoman advance through Eastern Europe had been 
decisively halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less risible. The French historian 
Alain Besancon is one of a number of European intellectuals who detect a 
significant threat to the continent's traditional Christian culture. The 
Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor has for some years referred to the rise of a 
new ''Eurabia'' that is hostile in equal measure to the United States and 
Israel. Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an apocalyptic book titled 
''The Death of the West,'' prophesying that declining European fertility and 
immigration from Muslim countries could turn ''the cradle of Western 
civilization'' into ''its grave.''

Such Spenglerian talk has gained credibility since 9/11. The ''3/11'' 

bombings in Madrid confirm that terrorists sympathetic to Osama bin Laden 
continue to operate with comparative freedom in European cities. Some 
American commentators suspect Europeans of wanting to appease radical Islam. 
Others detect in sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism a sinister 
conjunction of old fascism and new fundamentalism.

Most European Muslims are, of course, law-abiding citizens with little 
sympathy for terrorist attacks on European cities. Moreover, they are drawn 
from a wide range of countries and of Islamic traditions, few of them close 
to Arabian Wahhabism. Nevertheless, there is no question that the continent 
is experiencing fundamental demographic and cultural changes whose long-term 
consequences no one can foresee.

To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic 
decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still 
crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries 

that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the 
world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by 
2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4 
percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for 
immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current 
European Union members will fall by around 7.5million over the next 45 
years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European 
population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the 
United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and 
2050.)

With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed 50 
by 2050 -- roughly 1 in 3 people will be 65 or over -- the welfare states 
created in the wake of World War II plainly require drastic reform. Either 
today's newborn Europeans will spend their working lives paying 75 percent 

tax rates or retirement and ''free'' health care will simply have to be 
abolished. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans will have to tolerate 
more legal immigration.

But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a 
high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's 
fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A 
youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised 
to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.

This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the 
decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, 
Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a 
month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say 
that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms 
that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism, 

their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of 
fanaticism.

What the consequences of these changes will be is very difficult to say. A 
creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom is one conceivable result: 
while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith weaker, the 
Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their 
religious observance. A backlash against immigration by the economically 
Neanderthal right is another: aging electorates turn to demagogues who offer 
sealed borders without explaining who exactly is going to pay for the 
pensions and health care. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a happy 
fusion between rapidly secularized second-generation Muslims and their 
post-Christian neighbors. Indeed, we may conceivably end up with all three: 
Situation 1 in France, Situation 2 in Austria and Situation 3 in Britain.

Still, it is hard not to be reminded of Gibbon -- especially now that his 

old university's Center for Islamic Studies has almost completed work on its 
new premises. In addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, the building 
is expected to feature ''a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret 
tower.''

When I first glimpsed a model of that minaret, I confess, the phrase that 
sprang to mind was indeed ''decline and fall.''


Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of history at the Stern School of 
Business, New York University. His book ''Colossus: The Price of America's 
Empire'' will be published this month by Penguin Press.


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