Churning Among Muslims: Why They Are Leaving Islam and The Effect on Global Demographics | Dr Elst

people tend to prefer to live in a non-muslim country that is certainly true for Hindus for Christians from the Middle East there are many running away in my country there is quite quite a number of Middle Eastern Christians also Muslims want to run away it you know many of these Syrian refugees prefer to live in Germany or to go to America rather than to go to Turkey or some Islamic country in their neighborhood so there is something wrong with Islamic regimes India now is break-even population is no longer growing or at least the birth rate is no longer growing it is at even level a reproductive level 2.1 per woman but that means that the hindu birth rate is already clearly lower than 2.1 whereas the muslim birth rate obviously is higher than 2.1 so what you're going to get now well very soon the hindu number is going to level off i'm like at most one generation from now whereas the muslim population keeps growing growing growing [Music] yes ladies and gentlemen we're going to focus on the race within the Islamic world between expansion both demographic expansion and institutional expansion and the churning within the Muslim community that self-doubt a doubt about Islam and the phenomenon that more and more Muslims are leaving Islam the subject of Islam is something that I haven't really been busy with for quite some time because I decided already at least 10 years ago that everything has been said it's a very simple topic I mean you can of course fill your life finding out more details and the whole history and so on but essentially it is very simple so I didn't care for it anymore except that in my society in Western Europe well as Lomb is on the March and it came much in the news with the terror attacks now it's a bit of a lower ad for terror but around 2015-16 and we're very much alive and so there were terror attacks for example in Brussels 2016 in two places where I come very often so you know it could have happened to me and in fact two days later there was a visit by Narendra Modi who you know gave a little nod to the recent events by starting the speech saying that he commiserated with the victims and that of course these terror attacks have nothing to do with the real Islam that's what politicians say my attention was then drawn not so much by Islam because I knew what Islam is capable of it was also the time of Isis in Syria and so there was a lot in the news the cruelty of Islam the atrocities by Islam yet you see all the politicians said that this had nothing to do with Islam I mean this was as sure as anything if Islam comes in the news negatively immediately you will have official statements that he had nothing to do with Islam also when it's long came in the news negatively immediately you would have all a whole queue of politicians lining up at the nearest mosque to say to Muslims all we are with you you know we don't want you to get the blame it has nothing to do with his law right so frankly I am more worried about the non-muslims and the way they treat the Islam problem then about Muslims themselves you know if they defend themselves if they try to whitewash their acts well that's anyway understandable whereas what the particularly the left but also quite a few on the right are saying about Islam that is more difficult to accept like for instance you have very many secular you know leftist anti-clerical politicians who nevertheless side with Islam they're still against Christianity though less militantly than they used to but they are not critical of Islam at all like for example just now there has been the case in France of teenage girl who seems to be lesbian and so she was attacked for that on social media by Muslims and so she in reply she gave her her opinion about Islam which is quite negative and so she called Islam some really nasty names and then she received death threats and then politicians like sickle and wild clearly blamed her for what happened to her she has assaulted herself and also the the justice minister of all people and moreover she gave a proposal I mean the minister that French law should ban blasphemy you know just like in Pakistan now France is the mother country of secularism militantly secular did the regime's since at least 1905 and but also of course during the French Revolution were militantly anti-clerical and certainly you know didn't care for a notion of blasphemy so now for the Secretary French government to house the law against blasphemy that is really a hundred and eight degrees turn so those people are strongly in favor of Islam like for instance most of them in all seriousness use the term Islamophobia now if Islamophobia is isn't nonsense term a phobia you know that term is used for a psychiatric disease and so in the Soviet Union it is well known that dissenters were sent to psychiatric hospitals all right so now this is happening again so any criticism of Islam is dismissed as Islamophobia the term was launched it was already used during the colonial period in French Algeria but it was launched as a pro Islamic term as a whitewash term in by the running meat trust around 1990 so this is a unofficial anti-racist body in Britain and then I was picked up immediately by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and then it has passed on into common parlance the United Nations the European Union and so on they all use it they all declare it one of the biggest enemies so or I'll give another example the feminist movement you would think that they are concerned about Islam well they are not for instance to take one of the most serious problems I mean you know I'm not going to talk about the hijab you know the veil of that I would say well you know it's not so important right I myself was once thrown out of school for having long hair there was a provocative thing in those days so I am very much in favor of the freedom of people to do with their looks what they want only that is very often not the case you see girls wear these because they are forced to but anyway that that you know is like relatively unimportant what is for instance very important is the practice of female genital mutilation which also exists in India so top feminists have said that you know this is no concern like Germaine Greer from Australia one of the leading feminists SIA said well this is like a cosmetic operation you know this missing like that so the liberal attitude towards the Islam problem that I find very problematic now of course in India you get to see a lot more of the threat that Islam poses like just now here in Delhi this agitation against the citizenship Amendment Act right now I am motivated to talk about the Islam problem itself but in Europe it's also once in a while it is there but in India you feel it far more physically it Islam a problem you see I mean I'm already assuming that there is such a thing as an Islam problem but many people will say how so you see you don't say that about any other religion why about Islam well first of all I might say it about quite a few other religions but anyway we're talking about Islam like they say for instance okay you know Hindus and Europeans also are worried oh my god our country is becoming Muslim majority the demographic growth of Islam is such that it is inevitable that in some decades it will become Muslim majority you know and then some people say yeah but is that a problem you see now there is a non Muslim majority that's not more of a problem than a Muslim majority well I don't think so because just simply can see what is happening in every Muslim country in the world to different degrees of course like for example Malaysia it's not too bad it's not too dictatorial nevertheless in the first elections in Malaysia the the Muslims were about 48% in fact let's say 50% because the the adivasis the real original inhabitants didn't really take part in the political process but so having just enough to get the majority from then on the Muslims started changing the whole polity and making it more and more Islamic and introducing more and more discriminations against the Chinese and the Indian minorities which they managed to give a secular colouring by introducing discriminations that would favor the bumiputra the sons of the soil now strictly speaking as a historian I would like to remark that the Malays are not the songs of the soil you see the Austronesian language family to which they belong originated as far as we can trace back in southern China and it spread all over from mother house car to New Zealand the whole island world was populated by them and so Malaysia is in that same case the original population is in terms of physical type more Negrito as they say quite distinct from Malays themselves and so they are the real bumiputra but okay you know let's not fuss about that at any rate they introduced the number of discriminations in favor of Islam so now they're far more than 50 percent well and so in a way not in Ramadi with his introduction of politics in favor of the refugees from Islamic countries could easily have included Malaysia all right though indeed it is not as bad as Pakistan but okay so this is the case in every Muslim majority country in the world there is always some degree of discrimination against the others there is less so than in some places in the Middle Ages like in India we were pretty violent pretty aggressive but you know because they are all influenced to some extent by the New World Order by Western values values of tolerance and so on to some extent they can't go too far but still people tend to prefer to live in a non-muslim country that is certainly true for Hindus for Christians from the Middle East there are many running away in my country there is quite quite a number of Middle Eastern Christians also Muslims want to run away it you know many of these Syrian refugees prefer to live in Germany or to go to America rather than to go to Turkey or some Islamic country in their neighborhood so there is something wrong with Islamic regimes and so people you know dread the day that Muslims become the majority for instance in India now if you look at the demographic figures it is very certain that Muslims are going to take over you know secularists set up these ridiculous stories that this is all made up and you will see nothing of it will happen I remember Mani Shankar ayah writing in 1991 that Muslims were 11% of the population and they would stay 11% forever no that doesn't exist everything remains the same forever and in this case in particular it's something you can test see by census figures there are now about 15% and the Muslims themselves say that they are in fact far more that our number is underestimated like science our abuddin used to write at already in the 90s and so one reason given for this was that there are many illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh also in fact from Pakistan far more than we realize and that many of them try to stay below the radar see of course they find that in India there is no serious search for illegals or something you know they can get away with lots under the communist government take out ration cards and so on they could practically act like citizens and then with that record they could even go to the the population office the citizenship office and even try to get citizenship which is very many cases happens but so for all those for whom it didn't happen well because they are used to the authoritarian of Islamic states they couldn't believe that India was really so silly and tolerant as they were experiencing they thought well maybe one day you'll see these ugly fishes Hindu nationalists are coming to power and are going to get serious about this and so that is what now seems to be happening that's why you have all these protests now I don't know if it is really going to materialize but at any rate now it is really in the air and so all the Muslims who have been lying low you know turn out to have been wise in doing so now so according to Shahabuddin the late john abuddin or you know many others now the percentage of muslims is seriously larger than than 15 he thought yesterday some some lawyer of Hindu nationalist persuasion told me that Muslims in India are not 200 million they are actually four hundred million now that I wouldn't have believed you see I thought maybe maybe 20 million more but 200 million and he said no you see don't be mistaken and so the the real reason why there's so much against the population register it's precisely that they don't want this to come to light now I don't know you see my first idea is this must be a conspiracy theory anyway if we wait long enough then it will be 400 million and 600 million and more because you see what is the situation in India some some fellow busy with demography told me that India now is break-even population is no longer growing or at least the birth rate is no longer growing it is at even level a reproductive level 2.1 per woman but that means that the hindu birth rate is already clearly lower than 2.1 whereas the muslim birth rate obviously is higher than 2.1 so what you're going to get now well very soon the hindu number is going to level off I'm like at most one generation from now whereas the Muslim population keeps growing growing growing and in Europe you have the same situation Europe immigration is more a factor than in India but that they may be able to corrupt you see there are no more nationalist parties coming to power but that won't matter because there are already so many inside and so their birth rate already makes the difference and then you can say yeah but the birth rate among Muslims is also coming down that's true you know women today have less children and their mothers have but nevertheless what what counts is that it's always higher than the comparable figure for non-muslims so yes Muslims are becoming the majority count stop it I mean there are of course campaigns oh yeah we should have more babies like for instance some in one of the Christian denominations in Kerala they had a letter read out in church for all the older faithful where every Christian there was called on to have at least four children exactly the same that was proposed by Shimon Peres the Prime Minister of Israel some 3040 years ago in Israel it has worked to some extent you see Jewish women have like three children which is very much above the reproduction and unlike in Africa for example whenever very high birth rate they don't have a high rate of infant mortality now it's a Western society of medicine and so on so there is cleared rising popu in Jewish population in Israel still a bit less than Palestinian but it's getting there now so I don't know if this is going to work in Kerala but if you see the latest figures from Kerala you might understand why they are worried last year I saw the figure in the papers of Muslims being in Kerala 26% but among the newborns 42% that's how fast it is increasing and so when Hindus complain about yeah in all these Muslims day you know they do things like love jihad you know then it is laughter often paranoia and hate mongering and so on but now the Christians are saying the same thing and listing so many girls that actually have lived through this so they are worried so they try to stimulate the birth rate now yeah well you can do that but I don't think it's going to work I mean if I look at Hindus today Hindu young generation I don't think they will feel like oh I have to serve my my society by having more children moreover they all have been trained to four generations already to look at the problem of overpopulation which is really a very serious problem here I grew up when Poland and Flanders the northern part of Belgium were the most against Li populated in the world except for Bangladesh and by now of course India has practically bypassed us certainly northern India you know I mean I once took the train from Calcutta to Delhi and I can't remember one moment when I didn't have people inside I looked outside and you see there were little villages or there were people working the land and so everywhere it was full if you drive through France you see many areas are just you know without people just uninhabited in here you only get that maybe NEMA why are so now so it is really he's getting really full and so very many people say what should I have more children you see this is my country I have to take care of it and this is one thing that I must do and you can't go to so many other countries either they're also filling up so so I mean it makes very good sense to have population control whereas the Muslims on average don't care you say okay if we have to have less babies okay let the others have fewer babies we will continue reproducing so that's that's a fact and I think from a Human Rights viewpoint there is very little you can do about it it may also not work in China for example you had the enforced one child per family policy even even a tree did the high tide of this policy the Chinese population was still growing with more than ten million a year but on the other hand it is possible to control the population but not necessarily with these means you see in Taiwan they had the same decline of the birthrate and there the population is about to diminish like it is already very much diminished in Japan so actually you didn't need all this repressive policy this one child per family policy you know you just raise the living standard you raise the rate of female education and automatically you get the lower birth rate anyway that is only when the things that you teach the children are are promoting this this tendency to have fewer children but you see one in the madrasah they learn about muhammad saying explicitly I want the Muslims to be more numerous than anyone else that's what he said well then that's what they're going to do to some extent of course the realities of life may limit that it may be so overpopulated that buying a house is so difficult you know for younger people starting from scratch that they will have fewer children okay but even then they will still have more children than the Hindus in the same situation okay so I think I've pretty much made my point demographically you're certainly going to lose now am i panicky well maybe by the time I die it won't have happened yet so I needn't care but then again I have children and I also think about them so I oughta panic yet I'm not panicking because apart from this phenomenon of numerical expansion which in Europe also brings with it institutional expansion more and more Islam is getting recognized the Sharia is being accepted more and more so but in India that stage is already completely there is a full acceptance of Islam because you know the Sharia in its personal law but so the demography is there so okay you see the Islam expanding but at the same time you have a tendency of Islam to weak from the inside the American Protestant organization Pew Research they do this sociology of religion and so they have questions people in North Africa and so already since the 90s or even before and so they asked the same question you know do what is called it the longitudinal the long-term research in sociology were you every ten years or so you ask the same questions to people and then see how those answers at all so at a fairly fast rate the number of people saying that they don't believe in Islam is increasing and especially among the younger generation now to some extent about the young generation of believing many Muslims will say yeah but that doesn't really count you see that's how youngsters are either full of themselves they're full of their own little you know sexual pursuits and whatever and so they have no time for religion but that's okay now as they grow older they will become more religious again and that's a phenomenon the world over in every religion but still you see that the virtue of this long term study is precisely that you see how even within the younger generation this phenomenon is increasing so the present younger generation is less religious than that of a generation ago remember the Rosi affair Salman Rushdie wrote is novel The Satanic Verses which was banned in India in fact at the request of this very same site Shahabuddin you see it had to do with the IOT affair he had announced Muslim March on Io dia to coincide with some Hindu festival there and so Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at the time said well this is a bloodbath waiting to happen so he invited Shia he said look you know we want you to call this March off what do you want in return and so one of his demands was the banning of this book that had just been published and so then that the case became famous and it caught on and and the Ayatollah gave him the death sentence and so now at that time all leftist intellectuals in the West and some of them in India sided with rosy in any other situation was a bit complicated the hard secularists the Communists they sided with Ruthie who was after all one of them is a Trotskyite whereas the Congress eyed secularists they they wavered or they plainly sided with the Muslims like Kishan Singh like MJ Akbar now the ideologue of the BJP and I don't think he changed his mind very much but so at the time he defended the ban but anyway so quite a few leftists and certainly in the West defended Bruce Lee at that time also I wrote about the affair in fact my career as an Islam critic started with that affair and so back then I thought well you know this is exotic you see this is happening in India and in Iran but you know for us this is impossible this will never happen although we already had a Muslim minority that again was speaking out against diversity not just in England for example in Rotterdam not far from where I live there was a Muslim demonstration saying he-hey mu tote hey mu tote he must die so okay but you see that was the Muslims that was still a very separate segment of public opinion whereas the dominant leftist intellectuals decided to do it today you see the situation would be almost inverse well the Muslims would still demand his death but you see many with Muslim names would not the leftist intellectuals of course they they have completely reversed now they support everything in Islam but among the people who are called Ahmed or Fatima or so there are quite a few who have left Islam let's say two groups those who still call themselves Muslim but effectively are against all the touchy points about Islam and then those who have simply left Islam today in every Western country you have a society of X Muslims often with people remaining anonymous because afraid of the consequences or afraid to hurt their parents or what others also speaking out and some very actively speaking out writing books about the problems of Islam making websites where you can find all the information you see this is a point where the West has done better than India on other points not but here it has done better when the Muslim problem became acute in the West immediately some intellectuals set to work really scanned Islam made websites available for everyone no password no costs where all the you know all the ayats that call for violence against the unbelievers are listed where the whole history of Islam is can you know all the all the violence that Islam has committed against others and so on so here in India you had Sitaram well in the 90s writing about and that was about it there is a book about the Sharia by or about specifically the institution of gzi the tags that had to be paid by non-believers the toleration tax by harsh Narayan and then there was a book about the institution of slavery in Islam by chaos law but that's about it and that was in the 90s you see after that there has been no follow-up but anyway it doesn't matter because these websites are there so whether in Arabic in Persian I don't know about Hindi certainly in English you can get all the information right away and so you need to an increasing extent that is the work of X Muslims so that is a real change and I mean that has like never happened in Muslim history so this is the ambient modernity that is more and more penetrating Muslim society and some people say that you see I am way too optimistic and so on I spoke with the vhp wish I knew Parishad leader a week ago and he laughed it off you know he said no you know whatever we try now we will ultimately be forced to confront them physically well I'm not so sure you see there is a precedent in countries like my own I have seen Christianity collapse in fact my country the the flounders the northern part of Belgium's dutch-speaking part of Belgium was something of a Catholic frontline state surrounded by Anglican England Protestant öhlins you know Calvinist along Lutheran Germany and you know secular Masonic France and so you know many people who are militantly Catholic in the 1950s there was a great political struggle where you saw the Catholic mobilization or which my parents were a part at that time the Catholic Church was extremely present in people's lives like my uncle was a parish priest and so he was the chaplain of the brass band and of the Women's Guild and of every Association in the village and so he was the all-seeing eye of the church and he said everybody felt the church presence very closely you know every meeting of those associations started with a prayer and only 20 years later that the whole institution was collapsing I was part of that you see mine was a very typical scenario I'm the eldest son and so usually it was the eldest son who started who you know 16 or so announced to his parents I'm not going to church anymore and then the younger siblings started wondering what is there anything wrong with going to church hmm and you know they got interested and they also left in many cases the parents also left and even you see among old people who still go to church for like social reasons you know you hear things like oh my god you see what have they fooled us when we were kids you know did they still go to church but they don't really believe in Christianity anymore so an institution like that can collapse when people started out the main reason for doubt was not what some Christians say oh it was because people are becoming too during the war everybody is a believer in whichever religion he has but you see now after the war in Europe there was a great rise in prosperity and a democratization of prosperity so many more people you know were no longer afraid of the you know destiny and so they started to look closely at the basic dogmas of Christianity and these could not withstand scrutiny yet you see did this this movement towards modernity towards Dow towards rationalism had existed already for 200 years the church had weathered the storm quite well like in in the 19th century you know the upcoming socialist movements started trade unions okay the Christians also started trade unions with less of class struggle and so on so to sort of keep the the working-class is dissatisfaction under control you know this started the socially started cooperative associations the Christians followed the the Boy Scout movement started and so you know because people were moving to the cities but they wanted their their boys to you know have some experience of the forest and so on just on Sunday afternoon and the church was against this just like they were for instance against the rise of sports the rise of football competition and so they thought this is unchristian this is sort of pagan this reminded them of you know did the ancient Romans with their you know gladiators and so home so they tried to stop it but they couldn't it was too attractive to people so they started an organization monetary sports in my country sport ah which means what's a postulate then they started their own Boy Scout movement which did the same as the others but they also went to church on Sunday and so anyway you know they try to keep everything under control so they thought I had done this very well in the 1950s or nothing no problem and then it's collapsed so I see this happening in Islam also so now the the new wave new step towards modernity is the Internet and everything that goes with it so in the in the loneliest harem in the desert of Saudi Arabia you have computers and so it is secrecy of their own room they can watch all these Islam critical sites that's not the first thing you're going to watch but ultimately they'll come to that and so today Islam may think that you know the internet revolution has been controlled you know because they have their own websites you know if you have some problem you know what is the Islamic way to urinate you know that's an example from our own Saudis book fat loss so there there are Islamic you know there is Islamic advice about which is the Islamic way to urinate you know and any other question you can come up with there is some Islamic authority that has spoken out on it so there are websites with all this so in a way you could think oh yeah you know Islam is really has really gone along with the internet revolution but I don't think so you see I think the medium is the message and so the the accessibility of all possible information that in itself is already an Islamic and then what do you do on the internet you listen to music for example that is already on Islam and so at some point it will get you to clash with orthodox authorities and so i am fairly confident that the certainly the hard parts of islam are not going to live very much longer then there is also the experience that islam is not a success formula in the beginning islam was of course wildly successful it spread in no time and this is only well a few years after the prophets death that they had conquered whole Middle East all over Iran Egypt so that was it was very successful and then after that well once in a while it was not so successful but overall it was and anyway there was no alternative like for instance you have the Mongol conquest doesn't of the Muslim Middle East so that was a pagan culture though many Muslims in fact think that Jiang his crown was a Muslim because all the Pakistanis are also called home so he was he was in fact the greatest possible scourge of the Muslim world he is the man who killed the most Muslims but then you see they conquered around there this is Han Dynasty and they became Muslim and so then you know they were suddenly acceptable to the Muslim world so you see there again Islamic ultimately shown its superiority and and so the alternative that suddenly appeared on the horizon also disappeared very soon became Islam eyes but you see in the modern age you get something different although although you might think that that that that progress towards modernity has failed also you see in the colonial period the West was very dominant and so many people in the Muslim world saw it like that you know oh we have to become more like the West and so you do get these westernizing movements very explicitly in Turkey with Ataturk but also for example in Iran the period of the Constitution which is the early 20th century you know culturally Islam was looked upon us something backward you know something for your grandmother and you know we let it die on its own well as we know now you know that that didn't last so you get a revival of Islam and so you might think oh well modernity is not going to conquer Islam but again I'm not so sure you know Islam was very successful again for a while particularly because Allah had put all this oil in their soil but that's not going to last very much longer you know now with all the attempts to find alternative sources of energy the importance of oil is becoming less and then give off all the other domains you see that in technology the Muslim world is not producing anything you know they can boast okay you know with all our money we can send our children to schools in August bridge or Ivy League or so and and some of them become great successes yeah yeah yeah but that's not in the Muslim world and so in an Islamic environment they can't give their best you know they can't develop themselves so that is going to really in order is right now already influencing people this notion of oh my god you know we are a backwater you know and it is specifically Islam that is keeping them backwards so you know I can't quantify this I have no figures about this but as I read Muslim sources or talk to Muslims I find that that that mentality that change in mentality is really happening so personally I am well I won't say optimistic but I am NOT a doomsday prophets I don't think that Islam will become the majority in India or in Europe and by the time of their demographic maximum percentage already Islam will no longer be what it now is you see because again you have you have two tendencies you have those who really leave Islam but then you have the influence of that group within Islam you have all those who still call themselves Muslim but nevertheless you know don't want to practice all the extreme policies that Muhammad advocated there of course you have to be careful moderate Muslims are of two kinds you know you have those who are really moderate where their normal human feelings or their attraction by modernity really gets the upper hand over their Islamic beliefs but then you have those who very much are into Islamic beliefs but they don't believe in extremism why well you can achieve the goals of Islam without this romantic harking back to jihad and terrorism and so on you see the negative side of terrorism is that it wakes sleeping dogs in Europe nobody cared about Islam and I see then few intellectuals started seeing or there's something wrong but again the population as a whole did not care but then you had these bomb attacks you know I mean like your sister was taking the plane to take a holiday in Portugal and suddenly she's dead because on the airport some terrorists that being active and then it comes in the news and everybody makes statements about it and so and so now everybody is aware and so today I won't speak out on India but I can tell you in Europe the general population you can't fool them any more about Islam you know the the news media are extremely mendacious are always covering up Islam you know if they can some Islamic crime is committed they will not give the name of the perpetrator all that you see that doesn't help anymore if if the news says you know oh yeah you know so many people were killed by youngsters that everybody knows yeah yeah they mean Muslims so you know the general population is very skeptical about Islam and so yeah that is here I mean here in India for example now the present agitation against the Citizenship Act again makes people aware of what they are up against the enormous mobilisation of the Muslim community you know even though not very violent and very professionally contained by India's security forces nevertheless is a wake-up call for most non-muslims right so on the one hand you see there is this increasing consciousness of the Islam problem and so what is not yet there this is I mean what I'm saying now is relatively new very few people say that but so at the same time there is this counter tendency namely that the Islamic world is weakening that is very much there and many people you see don't have any global view about what is happening but see it in their personal relations with Muslims so yes you have things like love jihad and so on at the same time you also have the opposite tendency maybe in India is not so much yet because here the religions not only Islam are still very compartmentalized are living relatively separate lives even though this they meet in schools and so on but in Europe you see which is still a more secular society Muslims who want to leave Islam or who effectively want to leave Islam all while keeping an Islamic face for their parents can more easily blend in the non Islamic society and so you get plenty of you know mixed couples in many cases with the non-islamic partner converting which is also very much very much supported by our politicians but there are also many others and they don't come in the news but so I know quite a few so again there you know you can see in day-to-day life that Islam is not the formidable enemy that many people think it is so personally I am well Ani we'll see what happens but I don't think it will be that bad in the space of activism for example well there's not much you can do they have to do that themselves what you certainly should avoid is to support the the Orthodox is to support the Islamic oppression of Muslims who are in doubt like the case I started with in France where this girl is scolding Islam and receives death threats and then is chided by French politicians all you brought it on yourself and who are even demanding that the police investigates whether she cannot be brought to trial for spreading hatred or something so that should certainly be avoided but the most important thing you can do for now is to simply stop fooling yourself you see when I say that there is a problem with Islam it is the Hindus first of all would say no no no no what about the Prime Minister you see worldwide the press denounces him as anti-muslim as all can anyone cite an anti-muslim statement of his big challenge yes yeah it's the same problem in Europe though the history is very different I see Europe was very self-confident and I had a very high opinion of itself until recently whereas the Hindus had been told already for centuries that they were that they were lower-class people that they were backward that they were barbaric and so on and in their case there is no reversal on the contrary there is a continuation of this old condemnation of Hinduism and so it's about time to change that yes of course is he they continue to think very highly of Islam also because many non-muslims treat them with reverence treat Islam with reverence like even people who are anti Muslim are pro-islamic like guru Guevara the leader of the nationalist movement used to say Mohammed was a great prophet Islam is a great religion but the Muslims are the word he uses podgy you know the Muslims are scoundrels and that's what you see very many intellectuals who oughta know better also say you know that if there is if at all they recognize any problem caused by Muslims and they will say yeah they have misinterpreted their prophet you know the Prophet he knew it all he had the right vision but yeah you know the weakness of ordinary human beings who follow him you know they start doing all this mischief what can I say you see it is enormous our people managed to fool themselves you know I just saw on social media some discussion about Jahangir you know who tortured a number of people i Guru Arjan Dave for religious reasons and then you know some people replied oh but Jahangir was not religious come on you see the fact that he was a drunkard doesn't mean he didn't believe in Islam I mean like in Christianity in Islam too you have people who know the rules and don't apply them and so sometimes in a some stage in life after some crisis they get religion and suddenly they become more serious about a religion which may be a bad thing like in Islam you see this phenomenon very often with people who just live their lives and suddenly they get religion and they start persecuting others okay but anyway you see getting religion in the sense of starting to take your values serious hmm that certainly happens but so even when they don't live up to these religious they know what the religious values are they know they don't live up to them but then they explain that to themselves yeah but I am an ordinary human being I'm not a prophet I can wear the beard of the Prophet but I am NOT a prophet so yeah okay I'm not perfect okay fine and so to make up for that whenever something happens that makes them want to make up for that they will show teeth they will start defending Islam militantly in fact it says it's a thing you see among Muslim communities who need to prove their Muslim Ness you see in in Hinduism many groups try to move out like the ramakrishna mission like the fear of showers and so on in Islam you of the opposite you have groups that are not recognized as Muslims by the orthodoxy and that try to prove that they really are Muslims I think of the of madea's and so they're very fanatical I mean they're not recognized as Muslims rather than doing the logical thing say oh well okay then drop Islam no no no they try to prove that a really Muslim by being extra fanatical so yeah that is the that is there now a good attitude towards this you can speak out on it you know I am not at all advocating any violence or so that's not necessary but you can be truthful and first of all you have to be truthful to yourself you see all these Hindus fooling themselves it's unbelievable but then again I mean I am NOT some Westerners as well these Hindus they fool themselves because right now the same thing is happening in Europe on a large scale I mean the more important you are or the more visible you are the more you come on TV you know the more subservient to Islam become you know I I said you see many people cannot fool about this time yet as the ordinary people but you see people who are seen in public they always are ready to be on the safe side of Islam you have the same thing in India so that's the very first thing you can do and then you can speak the truth now about that many politicians will say yeah but I cannot afford that you know I don't want to be known as an Islamophobe and so on that will greatly hurt my career okay fair enough personally I don't think anything is gained by not speaking the truth but all right if I'm not going to tell them how they have to conduct their own profession if they say that this is what I need okay fine okay so you don't you don't speak the truth about Islam well what you can then do is avoid the subject you know not not not say anything about it there are so many things you can say like for example I remember Rajiv Gandhi he visited Syria and he said that yeah you know Syria has a lot in common with India because long ago Muhammad bin Qasim brought in the other message of Islam is so silly that was probably a speech written by Mani Shankar Iyer but okay so what should he have done you know you can say yeah but diplomatically this was necessary to flatter the Syrians as oh well I don't know you know look look at history you see are there any other points in common like for example long ago a group of Indians speaking some kind of Sanskrit you see when the Saraswati dried up and there was a whole desiccation of this northwestern India you got lots of emigration to the east of pop now and so on locally you know from the Syrah so he went upland whatever little rivers they were and they founded new cities like Pawnee but Sony part Indraprastha and so on and then they also went west and so in two languages the Kazakh language and the Mitanni language you still find traces of Sanskrit and the names also are sanskrit names now this the this Mitanni kingdom was in syria so you know if you're a jeep Gandhi you go to Syria and you say yeah you know we like Syria so much that our people went there you know 3,500 years ago and so yeah we have a common bond I mean you know you know I mean what our speech writers for you know you invent something convenient so there's absolutely no reason to tell lies about Islam so that's that's my advice to these to these politicians yes yeah yeah yeah but it's not only in places where they read and risk their lives I mean if in some insignificant backwater like my country some politician would be critical of Islam openly on TV he would not risk his life really unlikely that anyone would care to kill him no you see there they're far more concerned with their reputation if they start criticizing Islam they do not only get criticized from the Islamic circles they get criticized by the leftists also by the Christians by the remaining Christians as in Christianity you have this interesting phenomenon that they support Islam because as our own Archbishop has said religion is becoming more relevant again thanks to Islam religion had been practically discarded was no longer present in the public sphere and thanks to Islam it is again right so you see in that circle too you get really nasty comments about any criticism of Islam so it is more because they want to live up to those people's standards more than to Islam but then I agreed that in many cases of course physical fear of Islam is there and more so for Muslims and for non-muslims I mean if I criticize Islam that's not entirely without danger but then for many Muslims that means yeah you know a kaffir is a coffee no one is defending you know his own unbelief you know that's that's not so new whereas if a Muslim apostatize --is that's a critical yeah that Hindus don't support each other maybe true but I think many communities would say that there is plenty of enmity between Muslims though indeed that enmity seizes the moment that they face any attack from outside then they of course stand together that is indeed something that Hindus should learn a little bit I want to reiterate my point that I am not at all advocating violence against Muslims why well first of all I am not in favor of violence I think it should only be used as a last resort and I feel for my fellow human beings who suffer even if they're Muslims you know that's no problem therefore I have always been very critical of these Western military interventions in the Middle East you know they're very counterproductive they generate greater hatred of the West and of the world of unbelievers among Muslims so what the Muslim world needs is of Thor it needs to relax right now they're all mobilized against the external and so you know they need not be and you see in Europe it was in a long period of peace that Christianity collapse and so for that reason - I'm for peace in the Muslim world you know that that that allows people to mentally develop themselves to evolve some people say oh yeah you know there's plenty of Islamophobia I had some major problem look at those military interventions but these two phenomena I have nothing to do with each other Sitaram wallows a great critic of Islam he has never hurt a hair on the head of one Muslim he was very friendly with Muslims so by contrast look at the record of a number of Islam or files of Islam defenders each of the Western politicians who has announced I was ordered military attacks on the Muslim world has been a very outspoken defender of Islam even George Bush with his Iraq invasion Barack Obama and his two ministers of Foreign Affairs Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were all very explicitly against the criticism of Islam and spoke out in favor of this great religion of Islam in fact John Kerry when he was ordering the bombing of the Caliphate of Isis said explicitly we're doing this because we want to defend and restore the real Islam so in his fantasy world Isis did not represent the real Islam whereas of course it was founded by a doctor of Islamic studies who knew perfectly well that everything he did could easily stand up in Islamic court because it was covered by the president of the Prophet but so John Kerry who doesn't know anything about Islam nevertheless told everyone yeah you know this is not the real Islam and we're going to teach them we're going to bomb them so what he was saying is in order to uphold the real Islam we are going to bomb thousands of Muslims to death John Cameron the Prime Minister of Great Britain likewise said about Isis they are not Muslims but monsters meaning that you see he was sending his troops to Iraq in order to kill people who happen to be Muslims but you see we we now declare them monsters and so then it's okay all right we don't want to kill Muslims we want to kill monsters well so I am not in favor of that you see I think all this bombing was absolutely counterproductive it was bad for the Western countries themselves it was bad for the people in Syria Iraq Libya and so it was very bad for the consciousness concerning Islam so that is certainly not the thing to do and I mean I wonder you know what happened to the people who advocated these invasions at the time like the invasion in Libya was ultimately started by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy under the influence of a French philosopher Bernardo Olivier who was all about human rights and so on and Gaddafi's dictator well yes Gaddafi is a dictator see in that part of the world it's hard to survive if you're not a dictator and moreover he has often quite a bit let's see in the in the 80s or so he was supporting terrorism you know hijackings of airplanes and I'm very outspoken you know if you just saw his interviews I could understand that America would treat him as an enemy like you know he was asked at some point if these Spanish cities in North Africa there are a few cities belonging to Spain but they are like all North Africans sold in Morocco so he was asked don't you think that this is a problem and he said no this is not a problem those cities are our Arab cities you know meaning we claim them so why should the Spanish worry about that I mean he was fun you know like for instance the way he changed the flag you know the flag was originally some color pattern and so he dropped that the flag is green you know just like a Hindu flag is orange so I mean it was interesting and he was not too oppressive I mean compared to other Middle Eastern dictators okay he was just one of them but what is special about him is that he really cared for the prosperity of his people so he had all all this oil wealth and he used it to improve the life of his people so you see then to fuss about human rights look what humor eyes they have now look at Libya today so I think that those people who wanted those interventions should really be ashamed of themselves yes but then you see of course he was the true but you see for the minorities in Iraq he was the best they could hope for and so for a power that is very much a Christian power the United States it is bizarre that they that they had a policy about Iraq that was so detrimental to the Christian presence there I mean what they have in in the place of this socialist dictator was you see these Ayatollah who came to power and and then O'Connell local militia that were not on the state control but that at any rate chased Acrisius away so and then you know other things that follow like they made room for the Caliphate you know under under Saddam Hussein there would have been no Isis so no it was a big mistake I mean I thought for principle reasons since the beginning that it was a mistake but I didn't know what was coming but when you now see the results you know how could you possibly defend that okay last question yeah true but you see the balut is another religious group then you would have to extend the dominion over the law even farther you know then you get a lot more ethnic groups like the Hazaras in Afghanistan I mean it was a difficult thing to decide and to to define the borders like I said you see Malaysia could have been included it wasn't so I was a bit of a difficult thing I think that the government should have studied the question more and fine-tuned their the text of their law but I can't say that I really know how it should be done you know like the situation Assam is very different from that in West Bengal for example you know to arrange all that I'm not sure that that law was really necessary because to a large extent it is part of the discretionary powers of a government whom they allow in whom they give citizenship to and so here they really drew attention to a kind of discrimination admittedly not discrimination among Indian citizens but still it looked bad and so what is really necessary in India is on the contrary equality between the religions namely an abolition of the discriminations against Hinduism now here many foreign foreign viewers will not understand what I'm talking about but there are very serious constitutional discriminations against the majority community so if you want to do something about that you promote the idea of equality and that you don't do by passing a law that speaks about inequality namely between the Muslim oppressors in the neighboring countries versus the non-muslim oppressed not that that doesn't describe reality very much but to cast that into law and to have your own signature under it that was not wise yeah exactly okay thanks a lot you

Channel: Sangam Talks

Views: 174,360

Rating: 4.8352613 out of 5

Keywords: Ex Muslims, Leaving Islam, Terror attacks, Hindu Terror, Secularism, Islamophobia, CAA, Citizenship Amendment Act, Demographic growth of Muslim, NPR, National Population Register, Love jihad, population control, the satanic verses, Salman Rushdie, ISIS, Liberal attitude towards Islam, Shaheen Bagh, koenraad elst, Sangam Talks, global demographics, demographic changes

Id: jzZGRl5m_x0

Length: 82min 39sec (4959 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020