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Order in society without a great burden on the adherents.
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That's interesting. In the Cape area of SA the dominant ethnic group is the "Coloured" people. There are many subsets within this large group, and historically there was a small number of Muslims descended from Indonesians and Malays who settled or were settled there during the days of the Dutch Empire.
Now the numbers are growing, and the big thing seems to me to be the prohibition against alcohol. The Coloureds are like some other groups in other parts of the world in that they have a particular weakness (party genetic and partly otherwise) in that area and it's hard for the communities as a whole to stay healthy and prosperous. When they convert to Islam and stop drinking things change and it's easy to see how one could easily feel superior to those who surround them when they start prospering in a relative sense.
Still, in Europe the numbers just aren't there, and there are strongly competing forms of nationalism and ethnic identity. After all, if you were to plot a graph detailing the percentage of the European population that is Muslim over the last thousand years at one hundred year intervals, the graph line would consistently go downwards except in the last century.
An overly pessimistic columnist that goes under the name Spengler wrote about this in general, and even in a worst possible scenario he points out something about Eastern Europeans that needs to be factored in to the discussion, even in a climate of doom and gloom on steroids:
Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News - Russia's hudna with the Muslim world Quote:
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Perhaps it is inevitable that Washington should misunderstand Moscow at this juncture in history. Putin has embarked on a monstrous enterprise, next to which Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor seems like a country parson. European Russia is dying, and Muslims will compose a majority of citizens of the Russian Federation by as early as 2040. But the successors of Imperial Russia, the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople to Islam in 1453, refuse to slide without a struggle into the digestive tract of the House of Islam. Western Europe may go with a whimper rather than a bang as Muslim immigrants replace the shrinking local population, but the Russians have no such intention. Putin and his comrades will employ all the guile and violence at their command to delay the decline of European Russia. The Europeans are the emasculated remnant of a fallen civilization; for better or worse, the Russians still are real men.
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