Muslim demographics: what’s the real trend in Europe?

Only few hours following my post on statistics, I was sent this YouTube piece from the BBC questioning the veracity of claims in a video entitled “Muslim Demographics.” It illustrates pretty wonderfully the care we need to take in examining our biases whenever we get talking about numbers. Also, it is probably the most downloads any piece on demographics have ever received, and so I’m sure a lot of demographers are pretty excited.

Clearly, the following two videos are pretty different in their aims. The first one, viewed over 10 million times I might add, is a call to evangelical Christians to get having more babies, because demographics indicate that the whole world is going to be Muslim in a generation or so. When you hear the ominous, dark synthesizer in the background, rattling like Satan with emphysema, you get the picture quickly that this isn’t purely an objective statistical analysis. No matter – it’s attempting to tell a story, and laying out fairly clearly its assumptions for which fertility rate is “required” to sustain “a culture.” Most analyses never go this far, so it makes for a good comparison.

Now check out the riposte from the BBC. It presents another set of assumption on demographic forecasting, as well as direct interviews with demographers from the European Union. Asking experts is always an important phase of the methodology of quality futures work. They do lots of basic fact checking, too, such as the fact that Belgium’s Muslim population is 6%, not 25% – a pretty key distinction.

Key point here from the Beeb: “Population projection is an inexact science.” That’s the soul of the future – a blurry view is better than none, but the whole thing requires professionalism and an open mind.

You can believe either one of these videos you’d like, in the final analysis. The most important thing is to simply ask where statistics come from, and why these were chosen instead of others.