Youssef Courbage, who is Lebanese, is a researcher at the French national institute of demographic studies. He served for a long time as an expert with the United Nations and has fulfilled many foreign missions in the Middle East and North Africa. Now, with his colleague Emmanuel Todd, he predicts the modernisation of the Islamic world and the birth, after Islamism, of a "de-Islamicised Muslim world" -following the patterns of the Christian West and the Buddhist Far East. ... Demographic factors also reveal that Muslim societies are in the course of a demographic transition with the rates of illiteracy and birth decreasing to levels similar to those of Western societies. Moreover, these elements are leading to rising individualism in the Muslim world. Demographic analysis thus enables them to reject the theory claiming that there are substantive differences between formerly Christian societies and Muslim societies. ... Emmanuel Todd predicts a period after Islamism: a de-Islamicised Muslim world, while Y.Courbage focuses more on secularization, not without a certain ambivalence, because this in fact means a form of secularization simultaneous with a resurgence in religiosity. These societies are in transition religiously.
Youssef Courbage, who is Lebanese, is a researcher at the French national institute of demographic studies. He served for a long time as an expert with the United Nations and has fulfilled many foreign missions in the Middle East and North Africa.
Now, with his colleague Emmanuel Todd, he predicts the modernisation of the Islamic world and the birth, after Islamism, of a "de-Islamicised Muslim world" -following the patterns of the Christian West and the Buddhist Far East.
...
Demographic factors also reveal that Muslim societies are in the course of a demographic transition with the rates of illiteracy and birth decreasing to levels similar to those of Western societies. Moreover, these elements are leading to rising individualism in the Muslim world. Demographic analysis thus enables them to reject the theory claiming that there are substantive differences between formerly Christian societies and Muslim societies.
Emmanuel Todd predicts a period after Islamism: a de-Islamicised Muslim world, while Y.Courbage focuses more on secularization, not without a certain ambivalence, because this in fact means a form of secularization simultaneous with a resurgence in religiosity. These societies are in transition religiously.
To sum up: if home country and host country levels of secularisation differ, the level of immigrant secularisation is a marker of integration, whatever the change in the level of secularisation in both societies. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
