[Trex]

Let’s not forget that that this is based on an interview with one man. To be sure, he’s an Islamic cleric, but it would seem to basically be his personal conclusions. Moreover, let’s not overlook the possibility that he’s being deliberately alarmist in order to get attention or to sway people back to his faith. (The 'Rally 'round the flag, boys!' pitch has been used by Christians, too, I recall.) Consider that even one conversion is alarming to Muslims; in many countries, it is a capital offense. Finally, perhaps I missed it in the full article, but there is no mention of the reverse ‘flow’ – conversions from other religions to Islam, which needs to be considered.

While I may have misread Subman’s first post, there’s little doubt that Islam, considered worldwide, is growing. I did a google search on ‘world religions’ + growth and looked at the first few hits. You cannot trust the internet completely of course, but they do seem to be pretty consistent. Just as a sample:

www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm. Christianity 32% and dropping, Islam 19% and growing. This is the site SUBMAN’s graph comes from.

http://t21.ca/religions/tp.htm. Under trends, this mentions, “A rising growth rate of Islam. Among world religions, Islam ranks as the fastest growing faith. This is demographically driven by higher birth rates in the third world rather than by an increase in conversion growth. Worldwide, the number of Muslims has doubled since 1970 to 1.2 billion adherents.”

Given the numbers, it’s going to be a while before Islam becomes the leading faith, but it’s certainly not dying worldwide.

As to Africa, Wikipedia lists the Islamic population of that continent as 402 million, but admits that it’s hard to be sure due to bad records. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Africa. It also notes that Islam is the largest religion in Africa and is growing. As anybody can change the contents of the wikiworld, one must again use caution, but it is indicative. About.com (http://islam.about.com/library/weekly/aa120298.htm) gives the figure at 302 million.

Even if we take the lower figure for African Muslim population, 5.84 million is less than a 2% ‘loss’ rate. One must of course factor in deaths and emigration, but even considering war, AIDS and famine, Africa’s population is growing at a pretty good clip. In short, I would be less than confident that Islam is fading there.