In a recent article for Magyar Nemzet, a major newspaper published in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned that by 2050, 20% of the population in Europe will be Muslim. This, he said, would be a direct result of Western Europe’s pursuit of multiculturalism and mass migration.

The data bears this out. According to projections a few years ago from the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population on the European continent is set to triple to nearly 76 million in the next 30 years.

Such numbers are truly staggering — yet this increase will not be seen in the Visegrad Four countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Why? Because of their collective stance against immigration, their strict asylum procedures, their efforts to secure their borders — and, by extension, Europe’s external borders. Rather, the influx foreseen by Pew will occur in Western Europe.

Using the model of medium migration levels, the Pew study predicts that the number of Muslims in the United Kingdom alone will increase from 4.1 million in 2016 to 13 million in 2050. In terms of the total population, this means the share of Muslims in the UK would increase from 6.3% in 2016 to 16.7% in 2050. Other Western European nations do not fare much better at all.

Why should this matter?

Many liberal minded people — as well as those in the neo-conservative ranks — have capitulated to the ‘politically correct’ policies of open immigration, particularly from Muslim countries. Under the pretext of rejecting Islamophobia, they have refused to control Islamic immigration and instead chosen to sustain a steady influx of Muslims into Western Europe. Policy-makers sympathetic with such a policy stance insist that coexistence with Islam in the Christian West is not a problem — when it in fact is.

Back in the 1970s, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre said: “As long a Muslims are an insignificant minority in a Christian country, they can live on friendly terms, because they accept the laws and customs of the country that receives them. But as soon as they become numerous and organize, they become aggressive and try to impose their laws, which are hostile to [Western] civilization.”

The late French Archbishop Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre celebrates Holy Mass in Lille, France, in August of 1976, against the orders of the Pope. Image courtesy of Fotocollectie Elsevier Nationaal Archief, licensed under CCA 4.0 International.

A peaceful “cohabitation” between the Christian West (whatever may be left of it) and the new “Islamic West” is, as has been shown historically, that sharia (Islamic) law — the daily guide for Muslims forged from the Quran and the hadiths — eventually negates any sort of equity or social development within the socio-political field. The Islamic approach ends up eclipsing long-established Western values and principles such equality between Muslim and non-Muslim, and between man and woman.

But the moral vacuum in the West has incited fundamentalist and reactionary Islamic movements, and has encouraged them to go from being merely a transitory phenomenon to an existential threat affecting the West in political, social, and economic spheres. Juridical impositions by progressive forces in the West — such as having to recognize the legitimacy of abortion, the “right” of two people of the same sex to contract a civil union, and the “right” of gay couples to adopt children — and increasingly lax moral standards that allow for pornography and the like have convinced many Muslims in Europe to find refuge within sharia in order to defend their values. Their common drive is now to establish sharia in the country that hosts them — and, eventually, across the European continent.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in an undated and colorized photograph, courtesy of cankurtaran, licensed under CCA 3.0 Unported.

It is this type of political and social oppressiveness — stemming from strict observance of the sharia — that Kemal Mustafa Atatürk fought against after the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). He sought to changed it in his country and publicly maintained that Islam was “a theology of an immoral Arab, [and while] it might have suited tribes of nomads in the desert,” he saw it as counterproductive for a modern and developing state. This was the primary reason he got rid of the caliphate.

But today, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is subtly reinstituting that long-discredited regime. This can be seen in recent actions, such as his decision to turn both Hagia Sophia Basilica and the Chora Church, both in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) into mosques.

Ataturk’s foresight and his understanding of the threat of Islam cannot be altogether dismissed — especially given that, at present, so many Muslims living in Islamic countries continue to live in poverty, despite nations such as Saudi Arabia possessing enormous natural resources. Barring few exceptions, most Islamic states remain underdeveloped, whether measured in terms of educational levels or other development indicators.

A growing Muslim population in Europe

The Pew study indicates that a record influx of “asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries” in recent years has led to a substantial growth in Muslim migration to Europe. However, even if migration were to be completely halted, the share of Muslims in Europe would still grow significantly due several other factors.

First, there is their higher birth rate, which far exceeds the birth rate of Western Europeans. Then, in addition to their observance of polygamous marriages, there is the fact that Muslims for the most part do not practice abortion or artificial contraception which further increases the child rate per family.

In February 2006, thousands of French Muslims protested in Paris against the publication of caricatures of the Prophet. Photograph courtesy of David Monniaux, licensed under CCA-SA 3.0 Unported.

Muslims are certainly on track to take over the European continent, especially when one considers how low the birth rate is in the West. For example, Muslim women in the UK have an average of 2.9 children — above replacement rate — while non-Muslim women have only 1.8 children. Muslims are also 13 years younger on average than other Europeans and their much higher birth rate is set to further expand this already stark difference in coming years.

In France — the country which has the largest share of Muslims of any European country at 5 million — one out five children born have Arab-Muslim names. And with the most popular name for baby boys born in both Belgium and Berlin in 2018 being Muhammad, one should recall what former Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Gaddafi stated in 2006:

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquest — [and we] will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Perhaps this is why President Erdogan urged his fellow Muslim Turks — those who are already living in Europe: “Have not just three but five children.”

How to respond?

Orbán has stated that increasing national fertility rates is his preferred way to counter the population downturn and the eventual Islamic takeover. “If we want Hungarian children instead of immigrants and if the Hungarian economy can generate the necessary funding, then the only solution is to spend as much of the funds as possible on supporting families and raising children,” the Prime Minister said according to the BBC.

Prime Minister Orbán addressing the House of Commons in Budapest. Photograph [cropped] courtesy of Elekes Andor, licensed under CCA-SA 4.0 International.
Perhaps at times, Orbán has taken the demographic crusade to an extreme — such as offering free in-vitro fertilization treatments. As a Catholic priest, I would argue that this cannot be upheld or defended. Not only does it dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act in which a child is brought by doctors and biologists, but it also establishes the domination of technology over the very origins of life — as opposed to the mutual self-giving that is at the heart of the married couple.

Orbán has, however, provided tax wavers — for life — for women who have four or more children. Additionally, in Hungary couples with three or more children are eligible to have certain loans forgiven. These are measures that are not just positive but necessary. However, in the end, what will lead the West to victory over the radical, sharia-based Islamic takeover of the West is the re-establishment of the institution of the family: that is, marriage exclusively between a man and a woman, and the proper formation of their progeny as established by our Judeo-Christian teachings and the Western tradition.