European Countries Everyone Forgets Are Muslim

when most people think religion in Europe they think Catholicism and they're not wrong a eurobarometer survey in 2019 found that 41% of people in EU countries describe themselves as Roman Catholic 10% as Orthodox 9% Protestant 4% other Christian 177% non-believer or agnostic and 10% atheist if you find a Protestant percentage too low you're not alone I believe the reason is that countries where protestantism is or was more prevalent are those where people tend to con consquently become non-believers or atheists the Czech Republic for instance is the biggest non-believer country in the EU and I think in the world with 56% of people not following a religion followed by the Netherlands at 52% and Sweden at 50 on the other hand Romania is the country with the most religious people 96% followed by Malta with the same value and Cypress and Poland with 93 and 91% respectively 4% Define themselves as having another religion and 2% describe themselves as Muslim following the faith of Islam but there are two important pieces information that we can't forget first this data is about the EU only not all of Europe it leaves out countries like Iceland Switzerland Norway and most importantly for Islam the Western Balkans Bosnia OVA Serbia Montenegro Kosovo Albania and North Macedonia plus mdova Ukraine and bellarus and second this data shows us percentages for the EU countries grouped together so while there are only 2% of Muslim population in the EU many countries have higher percentages within them many due to immigration so in this video we're going to find out about those two factors first let's learn about individual percentages of minority Muslim populations within European countries and then we'll go into those where they are a majority or a more significant percentage of the population this map shows us on a scale of light to dark green which countries have lower or higher percentages of Muslim population a fun fact green is chosen for this map because it is considered the main color of Islam one can find it in almost every flag of Muslim countries across the world green has a number of traditional associations in Islam in the Quran it is associated with Paradise green was adopted by the Shia Muslims and remains particularly popular in Shia iconography but it is also widely used by Sunni States notably in the flag of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and its usage or reference to it is constant throughout Muslim history for instance Alid referred to as the great one is a quranic figure who according to the book met and traveled with Moses in the Ottoman Empire the wearing of a green turban was a privilege afforded to the descendants of Muhammad and the traditional site of the tomb of Muhammad is called the green Dome being painted in this color by supposed order of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 19th century but let's get back to the map sorry for this little historical detour remember the data here is always a little outdated percentages depicted result from surveys between 2010 and 2015 but from what I could look up additionally while percentages may have changed a little the category I the shade of green they're in has remained the same in white we have countries with under 1% of Muslim population such as Portugal with 0.9 Poland with 0.1 the same level as Hungary or czechia and Iceland as well in the lightest of green we have countries like Spain Italy Slovenia Luxembourg Norway or Ukraine as well as Ireland they have levels between 1 and 4% it's interesting that Portugal and Spain have such a low percentage of Muslim population considering they exist so close to Morocco and Algeria Spain even having domains in Morocco directly still and considering they were regions under Muslim rule for so long some of them as late as the 15th century for Spain perhaps it's precisely due to the longlasting conflict between Christians and Muslims that the effects last until today but we'll learn more about this further ahead and still that doesn't seem to be the case when we look at this 2014 Pew Research Center survey on the favorability of Muslims in certain European countries we can see that Spain has a favorability of 49% yet has a lower percentage of Muslim population than Italy does with its lower favorability of 28% so we can say that low favorability equals low Muslim percentages be they of migrants or of natives we could say the opposite is true and that high percentages lead to lower favorability but France for instance is 74% favorable and has a 10% Muslim population which is reasonably high so I think the main conclusion is that these are not connected directly this was another small detour so let's get back to the map in a slightly darker green are countries which have a Muslim population between 5 and 10% such as Serbia Greece Austria Sweden Germany or France as well as Belgium the Netherlands or the UK the UK shows a surprisingly low number considering the perception of large scale immigration it has from the Muslim regions of what was formerly the British Raj Pakistan and Bangladesh it's also interesting how Luxembourg stands out within these countries of Western Europe having a much smaller percentage moving up in the scale we have the countries with a percentage of Muslims in their population between 10 and 20% these are Bulgaria Georgia Montenegro and Russia North Macedonia is an its own scale of 30 to 40% and hosts 32% of Muslim population and then we begin moving into the countries which have a Muslim majority and are effectively the Muslim countries of Europe there are Bosnia and herova with 51% Albania with 59% and Kosovo with 88 to 95% so now let's get into these three countries mentioning their neighbors with medium percentages to Montenegro and North Macedonia and then explaining why that's not the case with other neighbors like Bulgaria Greece or Serbia these countries along with turkey which we won't include here since most of it is within Asia are known as Muslim Europe apparently the term is very often used and what differs them from the rest of European countries with sizable Muslim percentages other than the fact that the percentages are effectively lower is that in these Balkan Nations Muslim populations are native ones they aren't immigrants from the Middle East like in Sweden immigrants from North Africa like in France or immigrants from Pakistan like in the UK no these Muslims are European by birth and have been for hundreds and hundreds of years throughout many generations so why is that the case were they migrants way back then that stayed and these are their descendants or were they local people that converted to Islam well a little of both Islam first expanded into the Caucasus through the Muslim Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century and entered Europe in the south after the umayyad conquest of espania in the 8th and 10th centuries Muslim political entities existed in what is today Spain Portugal Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages but they were to put it plainly kicked out by Christian Kingdoms in a process called at least for the Iberian Peninsula Kisha meaning reconquest and so Muslim populations in these territories were either forcibly converted to Christianity or expelled by the end of the 15th century by the indigenous Christian rulers those who converted but kept practicing Islamic tradition in secret were also potential targets of the Inquisition this extreme persecution of non-Christian justifies the absence of big numbers of native Muslims in Portugal and Spain on the other side of Europe in the East the situation was not the same though Islam spread in Eastern Europe via the conversion of the vulga bulgar The Kuman kchs and later the golden horde with its successor canat as well various Muslim populations liveed there called tar by the Russians who today still hold various regions within their Federation that are Muslims such as Chia or destan and more importantly for us here we also have the case of the Ottomans the Ottoman Empire was growing more and more following turkic migrations into Anatolia after consolidating their power there they further expanded into Southeast Europe and achieved local political power by invading and conquering huge portions of the Serbian Empire the Bulgarian Empire and the remaining territories of the Byzantine empire in the 14th and 15th centuries for you to get an idea the Ottomans first landed in Europe in around 1350 less than a 100 years later they already ruled almost all of the Balkans they held the region for over 500 years so you can imagine the lasting cultural and religious effect that this had over those centuries the Ottoman Empire did gradually lose almost all of its European territories at the end of the 19th century countries began breaking away until the empire was defeated in World War I and eventually fully dissolved in 1922 but their presence had its impact and local populations converted to the religion of their ruler in the same way they did everywhere else it's the same reason why so many Filipinos are Catholic after being a part of the Spanish Empire in addition to the conversion of locals a lot of people from other regions of the Ottoman Empire Muslim by origin and local tradition also moved to the Balkans namely soldiers who were placed there to fight Border Wars and then ended up staying when the territories broke away from the Ottomans first independently then as a part of Yugoslavia and then achieving Independence again this religious Heritage was kept in some places up to today so now the real question is why is it different throughout the Balkans even if we take those eight countries only Bosnia Albania Kosovo Montenegro North Macedonia Bulgaria Greece and Serbia they have tremendously different percentages of Muslim populations so why I believe it has to do with four different things first the length of Ottoman rule some regions were under ottoman rule for a longer period of time others were partly conquered by foreign powers or they achieved partial or full Independence sooner for instance Greece became independent as early as the early 1800s while Serbia got partial Independence in the late 1800s second intensity of Ottoman rule some regions were directly administered by the Ottomans While others were at times indirectly rule sometimes only as puppet states which allow them to keep more of their religious autonomy in addition many regions were partly forcibly converted to Islam following their attempted rebellions Albania and Kosovo are examples of that and even when conversion was enforced it was encouraged by for instance offering lower taxes to Muslim citizens third pre-existing conditions before being conquered by the Ottomans there were already different cultural and religious realities across the Balkans for instance Bosnia only converted to Christianity fairly late in the 9th century because of that Christianity wasn't as strengthened and embedded into their culture and conversion into Islam was easier and had a wider reach there was also the particularity that when the Ottomans conquered Bosnia many of its Catholic population fled into Hungary Croatia something that didn't happen as much with its other neighbors and four post-ottoman reality and for power influences Bosnia for instance was annexed by the austr Hungarian Empire who didn't in particular L care about forcing their population to convert into Catholicism mostly because Bosnian Muslims themselves had previously rebelled against the Ottomans and so that the Frenching Factor wasn't religion here serbians in turn soon developed a close relationship with Russia as did Greece in part and this brought them closer to Christian Orthodoxy in addition that earlier annexation of Bosnia by the habsburgs kept it out of the Balan Wars that its neighbors fought against the Ottomans in which they achieved Independence and which created further animosity towards Islam the religion of the occupier in order to promote their own national identity during and after the balcan wars there were a lot of voluntary and forced displacements of Muslims from the Balkans into what is now turkey a similar and interesting example happened a little later after World War I when Greece and Turkey removed the Muslim and Christian minorities in their respective countries and sent them to the other country in a very rare population exchange 1.3 million Anatolian Greeks were sent to Greece from turkey and 500,000 Turks were sent to Turkey from Greece in summary some Balan regions were further emptied of their previously existing Muslim populations While others were not as much so that is a brief overview of the Muslim countries of Europe as well as other European countries that have small or medium-sized percentages of Muslim people as a part of their populations what do you think about this topic did you notice any mistakes from me or do you have any additional information or context let me know in the comments thanks for watching this video subscribe to catch future ones and I will see you next time for more general [Music] knowledge

Channel: General Knowledge

Views: 165,476

Keywords: generalknowledge, funwithflags, countriesthatdon'texist

Id: pVXkWGJocYE

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024