by Guest

contribution by Matt Hill

Are we seeing the ‘Islamification’ of Britain? If a breathless report in the Independent yesterday is to be believed, the answer is yes. ‘Record numbers embrace Muslim faith‘, claims the article.

But look beyond the hype, and a different story emerges. Some people are eager to be misinformed about the spread of western Islam.



The Canadian author Mark Steyn’s 2008 book America Alone found a large audience for its apocalyptic vision of a future ‘Eurabia’: a continent where women are forcibly veiled, gay clubs are closed for business and white people are forced to flee as once-proud Christian nations fall like so many dominoes in the face of militant Islam.

Islam is a convenient bogeyman for those who want to preserve the status quo – or a superannuated, Christianised version of it – and fear change wherever they see it. Narratives of its expansion concretise people’s vague sense of cultural loss in a changing world – and serve the perennial conservative instinct to cling to what’s left before it’s too late.

Out here in the real world, however, something else is going on. The recent British Social Attitudes survey showed, for the first time, a majority of people claiming to be non-religious.

But more striking is the generational change the survey reveals. While 76.3% of people say they were raised as Christians, only 43.7% of people now identify as such. The real story, when it comes to British religion, is the number of people converting to godlessness.

And while 2.3% of people were raised in the faith, 2.4% call themselves Muslims: hardly a story of British ‘Islamification’.

A closer look at the figures quoted by the Independent shows it hides a classic non-story. A religious think tank has calculated the number of annual conversions to Islam by polling London mosques – who have an obvious incentive to over-estimate – and extrapolating the figures nationwide.

Even the head of the New Muslims Project, a group set up to support converts, is quoted as calling the hardly earth-shattering guess of 5,200 converts per year ‘a little on the high side’.

That a few Britons choose to convert to Islam every year – most in order to marry into Muslim families before continuing to live much as before – is hardly news. More remarkable is the growing number of former Muslims who have bravely gone public with their embrace of secularism, despite facing ostracism and sometimes violence for the offence of ‘apostasy‘.

Ignore the headlines: there’s never been a better time or place to believe in nothing much – despite the paranoia of those for whom it’s always the end of the world as we know it.

—

Matt blogs at Green Wedge