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Between 2010 and 2030, the ummah—the worldwide Muslim community—was predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity.¹⁸ By the time we got there, they wound up with a little more than that, the demographers having failed to take into account such icing on the ummah’s cake as the accelerating Muslim conversion rates on the Continent. But one third of humanity turned out to be a good ballpark figure, give or take. Non-Muslims did most of the giving, and Islam did the taking, especially of Europe. According to the UN, global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline.¹⁹ If you were one of those now mostly extinct eco-fetishists who thought of humanity as a species, then that nine billion was the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you didn’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you were less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: on the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population came from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa. Muslims would represent a third of the world’s population, yet, aside from a handful of rapacious emirs and a few thousand layabout Saudi princes gambling and whoring in Mayfair and Macau, enjoy almost none of its wealth.

That would come as no surprise if you recall that statistic about Egypt’s economic decline relative to South Korea. And Mubarak’s thug state was considerably less decayed than Sudan and other Islamic hinterlands where by the dawn of the third millennium they had done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. Nevertheless, they are one in three of the global citizenry. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Niger, which is over 90 percent Muslim, increased its population by almost half—from just over 10 million to just over 15 million.²⁰ In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but that was no reason not to add a few million more.²¹ Its population is predicted to hit just under 100 million by the end of this century—in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Was it ever likely that an extra 90 million people would choose to stay within Niger? Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations (now banned in Europe, following a “human rights” complaint), wrote vividly about “Islam’s bloody borders”—“the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims” and provided so many of the horror stories on the nightly news.²² But by 2020 you could no longer delineate with any clarity that looping boundary: the border was a blur. By 2010, there were more Muslims in Germany than in Lebanon.²³

Within a few years, Germany would be semi-Muslim in its political character. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population is Muslim, but the prevailing culture is. Recently, I saw an old film called Cabaret, with a memorable scene in a beer garden, in which an Aryan youth sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and everybody joins in. It is a long time since I have been to a German beer garden. Tomorrow would belong to chaps less into draining their steins.

Though less bibulous, the new Europe is an unhealthier continent. I am not speaking metaphorically. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the city of Bradford, 75 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to their first cousins.²⁴ Even the Neanderthal racists warning against the horrors of after mass immigration in the late 1960s never thought to predict that in the Yorkshire grade-school classes of the early twenty-first century a majority of the pupils would be the children of first cousins. Yet it happened.

The western elites stuck till the end to their view of man as homo economicus, no matter how obvious it was that cultural identity is a primal indicator that mere economic liberty cannot easily trump. If a man is a Muslim mill worker, which is more central to his identity—that he is a Muslim or that he works in a mill? So the mill closed down, and the Muslim remained, and arranged for his British-born sons to marry cousins imported from the old country, and so a short-term need for manual labor in the mid-twentieth century led to Yorkshire adopting Mirpuri marriage customs. Beyond Bradford, in the nation as a whole, 57 percent of British Pakistanis were married to their first cousins by the turn of the twenty-first century.²⁵ If, like most of the experts, you were insouciant about that number and assumed that the seductive charms of assimilation would soon work their magic, well, in 1970 the percentage was half that. But back then there were a lot fewer cousins to marry.