ISLAM WANTS TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD USING THE WOMB BUT IT IS ACTUALLY IN GRAVE DANGER

For years, one of the more confident boasts heard in some Muslim circles has gone something like this: "Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. It will take over the world."  At first glance, the numbers seem to back up the swagger. The global Muslim population has grown from around 1.6 billion in 2010 to well over 2 billion today. Demographers routinely project that Islam will remain the world's fastest-growing major religion for decades to come. It is enough to make some believers grin, some critics panic, and statisticians reach for a larger spreadsheet.

Fig.1

But before anyone starts engraving "Mission Accomplished" on the globe, it is worth taking a closer look. Conversions to Islam is more common than most people think. There are no statistics and we rely on Pew Research surveys which shows the numbers are few in comparison to population numbers. People joining are negated by people leaving and the net impact is negligible either way. The growth comes solely from population growth driven by several factors -- lack of education, women denied schooling even in modern days, women marry young thus have longer child-bearing time, a big rural population base (but urbanisation has arrived), less developed societies, relatively closed societies, men can have 4 wives, and generally a tradition of desiring bigger families (for stronger tribes). The previous Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah had 12 children; the previous Emir of Kuwait Sheik Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah had 40 children. That's not uncommon for Muslim royalties. The common folks content with 5-7 children, a large average nonetheless. Muslims thought they will take over the world just by producing babies.

You may have heard some imams warn of "an avalanche" of young Muslims leaving the faith. This is happening in some countries. We see significant numbers of Muslims in Indonesia embracing Christianity. In Iran, there is a Persian Renaissance and a de-Islamisation of Islamic identity leading to closure of thousands of mosques. Apostacy is a growing issue with Muslim youths living in Western countries. The reason is exposure. Islam is taught in a very closely knit environment - in mosques and at home. Non-Arab speakers have no other means of learning the religion. Mobility in the modern world and the internet has provided easy access to knowledge and new ideas like never before. While this outside influence is challenging, apostasy is the least of their problems.

Population growth tells an important story but not necessarily the story many people think it does. And once we dig beneath the headline figures, the demographic triumphalism begins to look rather less inevitable.

A Looming Demographic Reckoning Beckons

The truth of the matter is Muslim birth rate has fallen drastically. Muslim-majority countries are about one generation behind developed countries to experience the same kind of drastic decrease in Total Fertility Rates (TFR - the average number of children per woman). Fig.2 shows clearly the drastic drop when comparing fertility rates of 1980 vs 2024. This holds true across the entire Muslim world. 

Fig.2

Of the 41 Muslim-majority countries with a total population of 1,666 mn in 2024, 6 most populous countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran & Turkey, in that order) makes up 60% of the entire population. These 6 countries alone experienced from 1980-2024 saw a massive drop of fertility rate between 74% - 49% in one generation.

TFR of 2.1 is generally held as the replacement level. Below this, the population will soon hollow out. 12 out of the 41 countries have the TFR at 2.1 and below. 4 of the 6 most populous countries are below this replacement level (Iran, Bangladesh, Turkey & Indonesia) representing 38% of the entire 1,666 mn.

See the trend lines (2010-2024) by region in the tables at the end:
Fig..5 -- Middle-East and Turkey
Fig. 6 -- South & SE Asia
Fig. 7 -- Africa
Fig. 8 -- Central Asia

The trend is unmistakable. Almost all countries have dipping TFR. The cause for this trend of decreasing fertility rate is universal -- better education (especially for women), growing urbanisation, modernisation, growing economy, and easy access to information and ideas in the internet era.

Central Asian countries are the exception and an oddity. The 'Tan countries are the major exceptions to the broader pattern of fertility decline in the Muslim world. Fig. 8 shows these countries have either stabilised or shown rebound in the TFR. Turkmenistan in particular has show significant rebound. There are 2 main factors. One -- Central Asian countries are less urbanised than the other countries, especially the Middle Eastern countries. Rural societies tend to have larger families (more traditional, help with the chores, cheaper cost of living). Two -- after break-up of the Soviet Union, the economies of these countries have improved, especially for Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan with the oil and gas wealth. 

A well-recognised phenomenon in demography is the relationship between income and fertility is often non-linear. It is not simply "rich people have fewer children". For the poor, economic challenges meant inability to maintain a larger family. When a person grows rich, a large family doesn't naturally follows -- life style changes and many prefer to live life for themselves, thus late marriage and fewer children. When a country grows rich, cost of living increases, again make having a large family less attractive. However, the 'Tan countries are unique. The countries and people have grown richer, but birth rate is rebouncing. There are 2 reasons. Firstly, their religious tradition remains strong -- Islamic preference for large families. Secondly, while they have grown richer, they have avoided the South Korean or Singapore combined experience of extremely expensive housing, delayed marriage, intense educational competition and demanding urban careers that drive fertility downward. 

The rest of the Muslim world are seeing lower TFR. But wait a minute. Fig.1 is showing their population is still expanding in terms of number and world percentage.  This anomaly is explained by 3 reasons. One, their base number is huge so a small TFR still produces huge numbers. Two, the developed world and China are decreasing much more in numbers thus raising the Muslim percentages. Third, Muslim countries population is currently very young. It will take a while before the massive drop in TFR impacts their numbers. It will probably take another generation for declining numbers to work out. I venture that sometime in 2050 or 2060, the total population of Muslim-majority countries will begin to dip visibly.

Once the numbers work out in 40 to 50 years time, the Muslim world will face unmanageable fiscal difficulties. The advanced countries got rich before they got old. The Muslim world is getting old without first getting rich (except for the GCC countries).  They will lack sufficient resources to support an ageing population. That is going to be devastating.

The Muslim world has a huge water problem

For thousands of years, the normadic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding lands have thrived on the arid land supported by the many oases that dotted the deserts. Some famous names are Al-Ahsa Oasis (UNESCO heritage site), AlUla Oasis, Tayma Oasis, Dumat al-Jandal, Yathrib Oasis (where prophet Mohammud turned up one day) and Khaybar Oasis -- all in Saudi Arabia. Al Ain Oasis (UAE), Azraq Oasis (Jordan - which Lawrence of Arabia used.), and Siwa Oasis (Egypt - the one where Cleopatra went for her sauna treatment, and which Alexander the Great visited). 

No water, no civilisation -- it's as simple as that. For thousands of years these oases sustained the peoples of the region. It provided for humans and livestock, pasture for camels, sheep and goats. Date palms provide food and shade. Settlements grew around it. Trade caravans did not take the shortest routes, but move by connecting to these and many other nameless smaller oases. Oases had huge political importance. Whosoever controlled the oases, controlled the tax collection. 

The ecosystem sustained for thousands of years. Where did the water for the oases come from? From underground aquifers where the water accumulated hundreds of thousands of years ago when the climate of the region was different. Today, these aquifers have been over-extracted and almost depleted. Tight management of extraction had to be imposed.   

How did the aquifer water level disappear? First, it's human population explosion in the 1800's. As population grows, demand for fresh water grows. Human consumption actually takes up only a small proportion. In arid regions, agriculture takes up 90% share of the water resource. The bigger the population, the more mouths to feed. The more crops to grow, the more water extraction.

Just to get an idea, look at how the population exploded at the turn of 1800 to 2024, roughly 8 generations:
Egypt -- 2.5mn x 46 to 114 mn
Iran -- 6 mn x 15 to 91 mn
Iraq -- 1.5mn x 31 to 47 mn
Saudi Arabia -- 3 mn x 13 to 38 mn
Pakistan -- 22mn x 11 -- to  245mn
Yemen -- 2.5mn x 14 to 35 mn
Jordan -- 0.3 x 38 to 11.5mn

The question then is how did the population explode? It was not about exploding birth rates, but rather death rates decreased. Why? Those who condemn the evils of Western imperialism has to take a rethink. Western influence brought modernisation and better health care into these countries. Mortality rate fell.

An exploding population needs more food, more crops, which need more water. For a long while the people coped with traditional means of extracting water from the ground - pails, donkeys,  After some time, these proved inadequate for the growing demand. Then modernisation came with new pump technologies. Water extraction from underground reserves became serious endeavours. But this soon was overtaken by government projects which scaled water extraction to industrial levels. Saudi Arabia food sufficiency policy in 1980s took wheat farming to export levels, it became a wheat exporter. Water scarcity ended wheat farming by 2016. Libya - Gaddafi's man-made river extracted water from Sahara aquifers to coaster cities and farms - still going on. UAE - Gulf landscaping -- golf courses, extensive lawns, artificial lakes, ornamental landscaping.

Fig.3

The regional picture -- across the belt from Morocco to Pakistan, the aquifers are in various levels of stress. Arabian Aquifer System - severe depletion, Disi Aquifer - declining, Iranian aquifers - most stressed in the world, Indus Basin Aquifers - heavy depletion in many areas, Yemen Aquifers - critical , North Western Sahara Aquifer System - increasing stress. Nubian Sandstone Aquifer -- only this remains with enormous capacity. But it is still being depleted much faster than nature can replace it.

The surface water systems have also been excessively extracted and water levels in rivers and lakes  have reached critical levels in many places. Upper stream dams have devastated lower stream lands leading to diplomatic rows and possibilities of conflicts. 

River Nile -- Ethopia built the Grand Ethopian Renaissance Dam for hydro power while Egypt depends on the river for 95% of their fresh water needs. 
Tigris-Euphrates Rivers -- Turkey constructed a series of dams, causing Syria and Iraq to receive less.
Indus River -- Indian upstream water projects which Pakistan claims violate the Indus Water Treaty.
Helmand River -- Afghanistan's dams to improve irrigation reduced downstream flows into Eastern Iran and the Hamun wetlands.
Jordan's increased use of irrigation channels from Jordan River has depleted water in the Sea of Galilee which Isreal depends on for agriculture.

Many of these countries have some desalination plants with Saudi Arabia and Israel leading in terms of capacity. Desalination plants is a solution only for drinking water, not agriculture.

Only Israel  manages their water security well. They have the leading desalination technology in the world and enough plants for their needs. They invented drip technology for agriculture and has been a net food exporter for years, out of desert lands! Jordan's upstream diversion of water from River Jordan caused Sea of Galilee water-level to drop seriously. Israel solved this by using desalination plants to transform sea water from the Mediteranean into fresh water and pumping it into the Sea of Galilee.

While climate change and lesser snow melt are factors, the primary cause for rivers and lakes drying up  is massive extraction for agriculture, drinking water, and electricity generation. With both fresh water and aquifers diminishing, food security looms as a huge problem for many of these Muslim countries. Nature has a dynamic balancing equilibrium for environmental capacity to support a civilisation. The population explosion challenges this capacity. With water being a finite resource, Nature is sounding the alarm bell. In Iran, the government has announced that Tehran may have to be abandoned as the capital runs out of water. That may just be the beginning.

No drinking water, no water for irrigation, no food = no civilisation.

The lucky Muslim-majority countries that do not have this water problem are Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and much of Bangladesh.

Muslim-Majority Countries May Get Cooked

Three heat systems impact the Muslim populations:
Subtropical Arid & Continental Belt (Middle East to NW China). This is driven by massive high-pressure "heat domes" and sinking dry air that completely blocks cloud formation. The seas around the Gulf region are shallow so the waters are heated. This heat and moisture is sucked into the heat "dome" of low pressure over the land.  Extreme "dry-oven" heat regularly blasting past 45°C to 50°C. 

The Maritime-Saturated Delta System (Bangladesh). This is driven by its location at the northern apex of the warm Bay of Bengal and the world's largest river delta. The intense South Asian heat acts as a vacuum, pulling in endless moisture from the ocean over highly saturated, wet river soil. A suffocating "steam-room" heat; air temperatures are physically capped around 38°C–41°C by the moisture, but the resulting humidity creates dangerously high wet-bulb temperatures.
The Equatorial Maritime Zone (Indonesia & Philippines) This is driven by direct, year-round solar radiation right along the Equator, surrounded by the world's warmest open oceans. Constant land-sea breezes and daily afternoon convective thunderstorms act as an atmospheric relief valve, mixing the air and dumping rain. Consistent tropical humidity where raw thermometer temperatures rarely cross 36°C, but high moisture creates an elevated daily "feels-like" heat index.

Fig.4

This heat exacerbates the evaporation of land water systems of rivers, lakes and irrigation canals of arid Arab, Iranian, Afghanistan lands and Indian sub-continent to northern west China.

There is one more metric that is more important than air temperature. This is the Wet-Bulb Temperature.  The WBT is a metric that measures the combination of air temperature and moisture. WBT of 35% is considered the survival level. Humans perish at this level

When a person is exposed to a hot environment, his body temperature builds up. The body's auto-survival system kicks in. The person perspires. His perspiration dries up due to evaporation which cools the body naturally. This way, the body temperature is kept at the 37% C. If there is no evaporation, he perspires profusely, the body is not kept cool and he is cooked by fatal heat stroke. Evaporation is basically the hot air absorbing up the water. 

WBT explainer: Temperature and Humidity move in opposite directions. Humidity measures how much moisture is in the air. Naturally, as temperature goes up, relative humidity (RH) goes down. This happens because of a simple rule of thermodynamics: Hot air has a greater capacity to hold water vapor than cold air. Think of the air as a sponge. The size of the sponge is determined by the temperature. When air warms up, it expands. This makes the "sponge" grow much larger. The sponge has grown in size, the sponge is now technically "less full" than it was before. Because RH measures how full the sponge is (expressed as a percentage), the RH number drops during the hottest part of the afternoon simply because the air's holding capacity expanded.

There is an exception -- which explains why Wet-Bulb Temperature can rise. 

WBT measures the lowest temperature the air can reach through evaporative cooling. It represents the combined stress of actual heat and moisture. Even though relative humidity naturally drops as the afternoon heats up, the WBT can still climb significantly due to two main factors: 
1. The Power of Absolute Heat - WBT is a calculation derived from both the air temperature and the humidity. Even if the relative humidity drops from 80% down to 50%, a massive surge in the raw, ambient air temperature (e.g., jumping from 25°C to 38°C) will physically drag the WBT upward along with it. 

2. The Impact of a "Dew Point" Surge -- The rule that humidity drops when temperature rises only holds true if the total amount of water vapor in the sky stays constant. However, in places like the Persian Gulf or Bangladesh, the heat system breaks this rule because it has access to an infinite supply of water (warm oceans and flooded river deltas). So what happens is :

* Forced evaporation - The intense afternoon heat forces massive, unnatural volumes of new water vapor to evaporate into the sky.

* The sponge fills faster than it grows - New moisture is being pumped into the air faster than the air can expand to accommodate it.

* The Result - The absolute moisture content (measured as the dew point) skyrockets. When you have both rising air temperatures and a skyrocketing dew point, the WBT surges into the extreme danger zone.

To summarise, humid heat is dangerous, dry heat is not dangerous. Bangladesh is maritime-saturated delta system, thus has dangerous humid heat. Persian Gulf regions (and India, Pakistan) are subtropical desert belt dry heat, but its vast interior causes huge vacuum to be formed which sucked in the humid air of the warm Gulf waters transforming the area into humid heat.

The hottest region in the world is at Death Valley, in California. It is dry heat and there is no nearby humid air system for the area to pull in. Thus even though hotter than the gulf countries, it has never had an WBT event.

WBT of 35°C or higher have been recorded about 14 times in human history, strictly concentrated in specific coastal spots along the Persian Gulf and inland cities of the Indus River Valley in Pakistan. The spikes have been of short durations of 1 or 2 hours. India and Bangladesh have frequently approached or flirted with the 35°C WBT mark but have not yet officially breached it.

While WBT of 35% C is considered survival level, a critical factor is duration of exposure. So a longer exposure at lower WBT can also be fatal. Richer cities with air-conditioned rooms may have no casualties. Poorer regions with no shelter have no escape.

During the 2024 Haj, 1,300 deaths occurred and 3,000+ were hospitalised in Mecca, mostly unregistered pilgrims who did not have air-conditioned shelter. In July 2015, Bandar Mahshahr, Iran reached 34.7°C to 35°C WBT. No casualties because in richer areas, people have shelter. In the 2015 South Asian heat wave, Pakistan's regions Larkana and Jacobabad recorded WBT of 30% C, 2,000 people died. In 2015, 2,500 Indians died when WBT was about 30-33% C.   

Scientists had previously predicted rising WBTs in these regions sometime in the middle of this century, but it seems this climatic phenomenon is already here.

It is a strange coincidence that in the arid belt, the impact is on mostly Muslim-majority regions. In Hindu-majority India, the heaviest hit areas are in Rajasthan and Srinagar where Muslims dominate. In NE China, it's the land of Muslim Hui and Uyghurs. In Christian Philippines, sizeable Muslim communities live in the southern Mindanao Island. And though Bangladesh and Indonesia are not in the arid belt, the wet delta lands of Bangladesh caused it the insufferable and dangerous humid heat, whereas Indonesia has to contend with the dry heat of El-Nino. 

The threat of ageing population is a shared human experience. The threat of no water to drink, no water for crops, or getting cooked by the heat, is real. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Akkadian civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Mayans of South America, disintegrated due to severe lengthy drought. While it is obviously geography dictating meteorology in our present timeline, one can be excused for seeing somehow Nature is selectively biased against Islam.

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