Islamists are great strategists. Decades ago, while Europe slept and India slumbered, their leaders decided on a powerful global game changer, seeing in demography the key to power in a democracy, as elections are won or lost on the basis of voter support to a particular party or candidate. So, to achieve their ambition of world dominion, they decided on a global campaign to overwhelm the world by sheer increase in Muslim population. This is now emerging as a deadly weapon for capturing power in many parts of the world. Christian Europe and Hindu-dominated India appear to be on the hit list for takeover through fast population growth. After a limbo of nearly four centuries, radical Islam is again in fast forward mode.

Islam is essentially conquest oriented, as can be seen from the Quran, the Hadith and two authentic commentaries, the Sahi Bukhari and the Sahi Muslim. Its ultimate goal is Dar ul Islam, to be done first by inviting infidels to voluntarily accept the religion of the Prophet (‘Dawa’), or else by recourse to jihad. This quest has now been resumed.

Muslim strategists endeavour to humble non-Muslim civilizations by waging asymmetric war – jihad – against them through non-State actors promoted by Islamic States for launching terrorist attacks across the world.

Many bleeding heart liberals have been highly critical of US action against jihadi terrorists without acknowledging the repetitive targeting of US outposts and troops for years before the daring 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon.

In 1995, an American training facility was bombed in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and five US soldiers killed. The same year, an attempt was made in Sudan to assassinate the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was regarded by Islamists as a US stooge. In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 224 persons including 12 Americans. American intelligence agencies said these attacks were organized by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, which was responsible for attacking USS Cole near Yemen, claiming the lives of 17 US marines and soldiers. The attack on Twin Towers was the last straw which prompted the then US President George Bush to declare war on Al Qaeda.    

9/11 was followed by a dastardly attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001 by Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Tayeba. 

Since then, the western world and India have been subjected to thousands of jihadi attacks, the most spectacular being the Mumbai Massacre of 26 November 2008. The last decade has seen, world over, possibly 18,300 jihadi attacks in various countries. The cost in terms of human lives is nearly 60,000 innocents killed and roughly another 90,000 injured worldwide.

Most attacks were by so-called non-State Actors. But it is well known that all non-State actors are fathered, nurtured and armed by one or other Islamic country. Pakistan has played a stellar role in fostering and strengthening Al Qaeda and Taliban, apart from siring Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. 

Another Islamic strategy (sanctioned by the Prophet, as stated in Mishkat-ul-Masabih) is to exhort the faithful to have more children for multiplying the global strength of Umma.

This was clinically analysed by late Oriana Fallaci in her seminal The Force of Reason. She showed that the ultimate goal of Islamists is to overwhelm and overrun all non-Muslim countries by sheer growth in numbers and simultaneously undermine their governance by migration and infiltration of surplus Muslim population into non-Muslim countries. This demographic jihad of Islam has the potential to destroy democracy, root and branch. Once democracy is put to sleep through a demographic coup, a Shariah-ruled State can be established. 

The campaign for increasing Muslim population, in non-Muslim countries and Muslim societies, is being pushed forward with the help of Ulema and Islamic scholars who issue regular diktats directing Muslims not to accept the small family norm on the ground that Islam does not permit use of contraceptives. Simultaneously, the growing population in Muslim dominated countries is being pushed into non-Muslim countries for jobs, with a long term objective of establishing domination. This double whammy of increasing Muslim population and promoting migration and infiltration into non-Muslim countries has played havoc with the geopolitical scene in many countries where Muslims are still in minority. 

To progress economically, a country needs adequate and efficient human resources. It also needs an ample reservoir of youthful manpower to defend its borders from predators and hostile groups; especially countries like India, China, America, Russia and Australia which have extensive land mass, large borders and over-stretched coastlines. The demographic constituents of a society determine a nation’s societal mores, its religious and social composition and socio-political attitudes, the mode of governance and civilisational values.

Death by Demography

Rewind to 1974 when Algerian President Boumedienne famously declared in his address to the UN
General Assembly:
“One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst upon the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women”. 

In The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci dubbed this ‘the Policy-of-the-Womb’ for breeding Muslims in abundance and then exporting them to take possession of a territory or a country. She said a Resolution passed in the same year during a session of the Islamic Conference at Lahore in Pakistan spelt out a plan to turn into a tide the then modest flow of immigrants to Europe and penetrate the continent through demographic preponderance. She said that in every mosque of Europe, the Friday prayer is accompanied by the Imam’s exhortation to Muslim women to bear at least five children. And if the immigrant has two wives, they will have ten children and so on…

Fallaci chided European liberals as ‘intellectual cicadas’ for promoting fundamentalist Islam across the continent. Long before Geert Wilders took up cudgels against the rising crescendo of radical Islam across Europe, Fallaci was the first intellectual to warn that Christians were in the midst of “a cultural, political and existential war” with Islam. She recalled an interview with Palestinian leader George Habash in Beirut in March 1972; he told her the Palestinian problem was more than a clash with Israel, their enemy was the whole West, including Europe and America. “Our revolution is a part of the world revolution”, he asserted.

So as early as the 1970s, the Muslim leadership across the globe had formulated a grand plan of a demographic coup. Rapid growth in Muslim population is now a worldwide phenomenon, especially in non-Muslim countries like India, Nepal and Thailand. Akbar S. Ahmed, a Pakistani diplomat turned scholar, boasts that due to a unique combination of geo-political factors, Islam is in confrontation with all major religions: Judaism in the Middle East, Christianity in the Balkans, Chechnya, Nigeria, Sudan, and sporadically in The Philippines and Indonesia, Hinduism in south Asia, and after the Taliban blew up the statues in Bamiyan, Buddhism.

It seems that an Islamogeddon, turbo-driven by billions of petro-dollars bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries, and strategically powered by Pakistan’s jihadi storm-troopers, is on the move across Europe and India.

The case of Lebanon

Lebanon is a classic example of a society driven to violent politico-religious civil war on account of large scale demographic changes due to fast decline in the fertility rate of Maronite Christians. In 1932, Maronite Christians comprised roughly 55% of Lebanon’s population; Muslims were around 45%.

On this basis, Lebanon’s National Pact of 1943 stipulated that political power would be shared between Christians and Muslims as per ratio of their population in the country. Consequently, the posts of top ministers were apportioned between Christians and Muslims in a ratio of 6:5 (six posts to Christians, 5 to Muslims). It was further decided that the President of Lebanon would be a Christian and the Prime Minister a Muslim.

But within three decades, the tables were turned on the Christians. Due to large scale acceptance of the small family norm, their share in the country’s population fell sharply and around 1970-72 Lebanon became a Muslim majority country. The denouement came because the fertility of Christians declined to four children per woman from the earlier average of six, while Muslims maintained their fertility rate at six children per woman. The decline could not be reversed despite the efforts of community leaders.

The civilisational conflicts started rising sharply even before the climactic demographic change. When Muslims became the majority community and staked claim to rule over the country, a civil war broke out in 1975 between the two communities. Ultimately the jihadi militias aided by Syria and neighbouring Muslim countries carried the day in a decade-long civil war. The Christians were routed; a few lakh migrated to Europe and USA. Presently the Christian population of Lebanon stands reduced to 25 percent or less and is declining rapidly. The embers of the civil war continue to glow every now and then leading to occasional outbreak of hostilities between the two communities.                                       

Belatedly, European and American strategic analysts have woken up to the threat posed by the demographic surge of Islam. According to a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Muslim population across the world was estimated at 1.65 billion in 2008 (global headcount 6.69 billion). Thus Muslims already constitute 24.31% of the world population.

A survey by the Pew Research Centre in 2009, however, placed the Muslim population at 1.57 billion and world population at 6.8 billion. The 2010 survey by Pew Research Forum shows Muslim population growing worldwide at 1.5% per annum, while the population of non-Muslims is growing barely at 0.7%.

Christian Europe is in serious panic because the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of Muslims in Europe is
three times higher than that of Christians. In 1900, Muslims constituted only 12% of the world population; now they are touching 25 percent in just one hundred years. And in tandem with the percentage increase in Muslim population, the incidence of jihad against non-Muslims across the globe has increased.