Many people fear that there will be a violent conflict in Britain with the Muslims.  They are wrong.  Al Qaeda may commit the most appalling atrocities in the United Kingdom, as it has done in New York and Madrid, but the coming struggle will not be a violent one.  Most of the Muslims living in Britain have the same personal concerns as their nominally Christian neighbors—health, home, family, children, employment, business, enjoyment, consumption, ownership, taking care for one’s old age.  They are not going to put these at risk, nor do they feel any great animosity to their vaguely Christian neighbors with whom they must deal on an everyday basis.  Among Muslims, only a few young students and drop-out types are going to become terrorists.  Muslim suicide bombers may sound terrifying, but they are no different from an Irish Republican bomber supplied with a sophisticated timer paid for by Colombian drug dealers or Boston bartenders.  The Muslim takeover of Britain will be a peaceful one, a product of the rottenness of a liberal Britain in which no one is expected, indeed permitted, to take any pride in their particular national or religious identity.  The Muslims alone understand the need for boundaries and solidarity.  In the land of the politically correct, victory goes to those who still believe in themselves.

The defeat of the nominally—perhaps one should say, ancestrally—Christian in Britain and their supplanting by the Muslims will come about slowly and peacefully, though inexorably and inevitably, as a result of the decadence and loss of nerve of once-Christian Britain and the self-induced economic failure of most individual Muslims.  The strongest indication of the decay of Christian Britain is the collapse of the birthrate to below replacement level.  However, no one is willing to recognize the seriousness of the problem nor to take proper measures to deal with it, lest they be accused of racism for wishing to reproduce people like themselves.  Britain has a collective death wish.

The demographic gap will be filled by Muslim immigrants who will then choose cultural and sometimes geographical self-segregation.  In Britain, Hindus and Sikhs from India are gradually dispersing to take advantage of individual opportunities in the markets for jobs and housing and starting to intermarry with locals, but Muslim immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh tend to remain huddled in the districts where they first settled.  Many of the Muslims originally came to Britain to do unskilled work in factories—indeed they manned entire industries whose managers feared they would fail if they could not recruit cheap immigrant labor to staff cotton and woollen mills and knock together borax for the furniture trade.  When the factories inevitably closed in the face of competition from even cheaper labor abroad, the Muslims were stranded.  The road out of such a crisis for the individual lies in acquiring new ways and new skills and being willing to go and look for work and housing among non-Muslims; their mind-set often precludes this.  Those British people, mainly Hindus and Sikhs, whose ancestors came from India in the last half-century are already better educated and wealthier than the autochthonous Anglo-Saxons and Celts.  Theirs has been a success story.  By contrast, those whose ancestors came from Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh have failed to become upwardly mobile because they insufficiently prize non-Muslim learning, instrumental rationality, individual competitiveness, questioning, and innovation.  The fault for Muslim failure does not lie with those who run British schools or with employers, both of whom are generally quite unable to tell them apart from the Indians.  There is equality of prejudice against those who share a common hue but a marked difference in outcome between the communities.  Even Muslims whose ancestors came from India are more likely to be unemployed than their Hindu counterparts.  Religion is important in and of itself in influencing economic success.

Because of their inertia and self-segregation, British Muslims have a higher birthrate than the Sikhs and Hindus, whose increasingly educated womenfolk are coming to prefer smaller families.  Their lowly position in the social-class hierarchy by itself guarantees that Muslims will multiply faster than their more prosperous nominally Christian neighbors.  In all religiously plural countries, the Muslim birthrate is higher than that of people of other religions.  In India, they outbreed the Hindus; in Lebanon and Yugoslavia, they outbreed the Christians, a factor that has contributed significantly to the religious tensions in those countries.  It will have the same effect in Britain, though it will take a different form because of the enfeebled sense of identity of the post-Christian British.

The high birthrate of Muslims is often linked to the fatalism and ignorance that have also rendered them shapers of wood and drawers of thread.  It is largely because of the low status of women in their community and partly because of a muted but real wish to outnumber others by competitive breeding.  If you cannot attain strength by means of intellectual and economic achievement, you seek to do so through weight of numbers.  Such is the logic both of democracy and of aggression.  The crucial factor, though, is the lack of status, power, and independence enjoyed by women within Muslim families.  Keeping women down is the great source of Muslim strength.

Muslims (and, in fairness, other groups too) use arranged marriages as a way of getting around Britain’s immigration laws.  A British passport is a valuable commodity for someone living in a poor country, because it will allow him to settle in that moderately prosperous society with its extensive and generous welfare state on which they may batten the moment they arrive.  The most popular scam is to contract an arranged marriage to a British citizen and then enter the country as that person’s spouse.  Britain has been reluctant to prevent spouses from entering the country, on the assumption that emotional ties exist between the partners and that it would cause intolerable hardship to separate them.  In the case of new or proposed arranged marriages where the two people may not even have met, this objection does not apply, and it is perfectly ethical to tell the British partner to go and live with his spouse in the other country or else to live apart from her.  Accordingly, Britain introduced the “primary purpose” rule whereby a British subject could only import a spouse if he or she could prove that the main purpose of the marriage was not to evade the laws on immigration.  When Prime Minister Tony Blair’s politically correct New Labour party came to power in 1997, this sensible and just rule was abolished, leading to a flood of quite unnecessary new immigrants.

I say unnecessary, since the existing Muslim communities in Britain are sufficiently large to afford a suitable pool of desirable spouses for arranged marriages all round.  Many Muslim men, though, do not want to marry educated British Muslim women, whom they fear may have acquired something of the bossy and argumentative disposition of their English counterparts.  It is better to seek a timid, traditional, uncontaminated woman from one’s ancestral village who cannot speak English.  She may well even bring a dowry with her or be part of some sordid land deal in Azad Kashmir, East Bengal, or the Punjab.  The marriage may be contracted in exchange for the marriage of the foreign woman’s brother with the groom’s British-born sister, also in order to obtain a British passport.  The potentially independent-minded sister will then be tamed by this fiercely traditional husband, who will knock out of her any subversive British ideas about the higher status that should be accorded to women.  It is difficult to see why these women, who are treated as commodities rather than as free agents by their male relatives, should not also be so regarded by customs and excise and excluded from the British market in the same way as a cargo of imported pickled eggs.  In the very worst cases, young British Muslim women—and sometimes, men—are lured to Pakistan or Bangladesh on holiday ostensibly to visit relatives or, worse still, to visit a deceitful parent who has gone there from England, is feigning a fatal illness, and wishes to say goodbye.  Once there, the British Muslim youngsters are deprived of their passports and credit cards and held captive until they agree to marry a local person who wants to emigrate to Britain.  The incidence of subsequent miraculous recovery by erstwhile dying parents puts even Lourdes to shame.  Such marriages mean the endless importation of Muslim spouses who know no English and nothing of British institutions and mores.  The whole process of integrating newcomers into British society is thus overturned in each generation.  The naive imported Muslim wife will have the same number of children as she would have had back home, and the educated British Muslim woman tricked or forced into marriage with a foreigner will have to resign herself to submission and frequent childbearing.  The Muslim “leaders” have reason to rejoice: They have found a new way of increasing their numbers and of retraditionalizing their younger generations.

The problem is not one of individuals but of aggregates.  If the British Muslims made their religion a purely private matter, as the Hindus are in the process of doing, their arrival would not matter as much.  It is not a question of their beliefs—which, in many ways, are closer to those of the Christians than those of the idolatrous seekers of an escape from the wheel of reincarnation through the contemplative elimination of their very selves.  It is the Muslims’ determination to be heard as a political-religious collectivity that is threatening.  Muslim spokesmen (and it is always men) in Britain regularly remind their fellow citizens of how many million Muslims they “represent.”  No Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Baptist, or Mormon leader would have the impudence to assert a political claim of this kind.  At present, the Muslim presence in British politics consists of their control of a few Labour constituencies, but, in time, they will form their own exclusive political parties as they have long done to the detriment of democratic India.  As the British know from their experience in Northern Ireland, communal politics with religiously based parties is a disaster for democracy.  It would be even more of a disaster if similar Muslim parties were to be formed in France, Germany, and the Netherlands and such parties formed an alliance in order to hold the balance of power in Europe.  They would be able to combine in support of a common cause, such as loosening the immigration rules to allow even more Muslims to enter Europe, or in defense of enhanced “apartness” for Muslims, thus further increasing their power.

The Muslim takeover of Britain will happen slowly and by stealth.  In the future, anyone who dares to oppose it will be prosecuted before and condemned by Britain’s politicized judiciary, probably without the benefit of trial by jury, ostensibly for stirring up religious hatred.  Britain’s New Labour rulers undervalue and condemn the moderate solidarity of the indigenous people, yet fail to condemn the obsessive group-mindedness of the Muslims.  Britain’s left-wing elite have undermined the British family, caused the birthrate to collapse, subsidized illegitimacy, and deprived fathers of rights in the name of feminism, yet they say nothing about the tyranny of the Muslim extended family and its willingness to treat women as objects to be bartered and battered and as machines to produce sons.  They cannot see that secularization has led to the collapse of Britain’s moral order nor that Muslim zeal is contrary to the  core values of their society.  They are the hypocrites who point to the mote in the eye of their own people but ignore the beam in the eye of anyone carrying the privileged title of “minority.”

The future Muslim takeover of Britain, however, is not something that anyone has planned but rather the spontaneous consequence of uncontrolled immigration, demographic collapse, and cultural decline.  Gradually, Britain will become part of the Muslim world, with all its innate backwardness, leaving the modern world to be divided between the fiercely Christian Americans and the secular Confucian Chinese.