Reports in The Irish Times and the Daily Telegraph highlight impact of growth including overtaking church attendance in GB
Mary Fitzgerald writing in The Irish Times on Saturday Feb 12, stated:
“Ireland’s Muslim population has grown tenfold in 20 years and is still expanding. But official Ireland is failing to engage with the increasing number of ethnic and political groups
‘Down a road on an industrial estate in Togher, a suburb two kilometres south of Cork city centre, stands a nondescript former engineering premises whose future will mark a significant chapter in the story of Islam in Ireland. Within a year the hulking concrete building will be transformed into a mosque complex capable of accommodating 1,000 or so worshippers. Design plans show a crescent-topped glass tower overlooking gleaming white arches and domes. The one-acre site will be the second-biggest such complex in the country, after the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI), in Clonskeagh in Dublin, and the second purpose-built Sunni mosque outside the capital. It is yet another sign of the deep roots Islam has laid in Ireland.
“This is a very important step for us,” says Salim al-Faituri, the mosque’s Libyan-born imam. “We have been moving from one rented premises to another for years. Finally we will have a place of our own.” The new mosque, funded by donations including one €800,000 gift from a Qatari benefactor, will cater for 6,000 Muslims in Cork and several thousand more living in its hinterland.
“This is the second-biggest Muslim community outside Dublin,” says Ahmed H Zahran, an Egyptian academic at University College Cork who sits on the mosque committee. “And it’s growing.”
“Ireland’s Muslim population, when compared with other European countries’, is relatively young, but it is changing fast. Almost 10 times more Muslims live in Ireland today than lived here 20 years ago. The 2006 census put the figure at just under 33,000, but most observers agree the true figure is well in excess of 40,000. The number of Muslims here increased by almost 70 per cent between 2002 and 2006, making Islam one of the fastest-growing religions in the country.
“Ireland’s Muslim community is also becoming more diverse – so much so that it is truer to speak of a constellation of communities. In the past Muslims from the Middle East and north Africa tended to predominate. Most of this earlier generation came for educational or professional reasons and decided to stay, often marrying Irish citizens. From the early 1990s, however, the population swelled to include more Muslims from south and southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans. Many of the new arrivals were young economic migrants; others were asylum seekers. (Muslims from Nigeria, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Algeria and elsewhere have sought asylum in Ireland.) Irish converts make up a small percentage, with some estimates putting the number in the hundreds. The vast majority of Muslims in Ireland are Sunni, but there is also a substantial Shia population in Dublin.
“This is probably one of the most diverse Muslim populations in Europe,” says Dr Oliver Scharbrodt, who is leading a pioneering three-year research project on Islam in Ireland at UCC. “In other European countries you have a particular ethnic group or nationality being dominant because of historical or colonial links, but that is not the case in Ireland. One could say that Ireland constitutes a microcosm of the global ummah [community of believers], with all the different nationalities, trends and movements present and visible in a fairly small geographic and communal space.”
“Muslims here cherish that diversity, but there are increasing signs that the growing number of nationalities and ethnicities, as well as doctrinal and political cleavages, brings its own challenges, not least the vexed question of who, if anyone, speaks for Islam in Ireland.”
More at:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0212/1224289614194.html
Damian Thompson in a blog on The Telegraph site concludes that, Practising Muslims will very soon overtake weekly churchgoers in Britain”.
Commenting on new research by the Office of National Statistics he writes:
“Only a third of churchgoers actively practise their faith, as opposed to 80 per cent of Muslims, according to new research by the Office of National Statistics (above, and it can’t spell “practising”). As I reported last month, the number of British Muslims has grown at an astonishing rate, from 1.65 million to 2.87 million since 2001. This figure, from the respected Pew Forum, means we must radically revise predictions that practising Muslims will outnumber practising Christians by 2035, which were based on the outdated 2001 census figure of 1.65 million (which was too low even at the time). It will happen much sooner than that.
“If there are 2.87 million Muslims in Britain and 80 per cent of them practise their faith, then there are already 2.14 million practising Muslims. Admittedly, we should treat these figures with caution: 2.87 million may be an overestimate, so may 80 per cent, and in any case there’s no common yardstick to to measure the practice of two such different religions. Still, I was wondering how the numbers of devout Christians compares to the number of devout Muslims.
“Let’s consider weekly churchgoers in Britain. The Church of England dislikes this measure being used and has moved the goalposts more than once. A few years ago it was widely reported that the number of weekly C of E churchgoers had fallen below a million; now we’re asked to believe that it has risen just above it. Hmm. Catholic weekly Mass-going has stabilised at just below a million and that I do believe, though the stabilisation is entirely due to immigration. Add together Catholic and Anglican weekly churchgoing in the UK and you probably reach a figure of two million. On a good Sunday. Include the Free Churches and independent evangelicals and we’re looking at, what, two and a half million?”
George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, in London – the “journalists’ church”. In a blog on The Telegraph site today he comments on Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent comments on integration of Britain’s Islamic citizens.
In a previous blog Pitcher comments on the response to Baroness Warsi. “Thank God for Baroness Warsi, the chairman of the Conservative Party who not only has the courage to stand up for her Muslim faith, but also to take a stand against those who would poison the finest traditions of her party and try to hijack it with their casual racism and religious hatred” he writes.
He also stated,”Warsi was entirely right to point worriedly to our dinner party acceptance that casual abuse of and discrimination against our Muslim population is okay. I learned from my parents of the relaxed talk about the “smelly Jews” in England in the Thirties. Variants of the line that supported the idea of an international conspiracy – “not all Jews are financiers, but nearly all the money men are Jews” – has its echo today in the regular observation that not all Muslims are suicide bombers, but all suicide bombers are Muslims.”