Coxes Quarterly

posted by Ted on Nov 29

Mark Steyn notes via Powerline:

Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group, has announced plans to build a mosque next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people - only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral).

Photo of the East London Mosque courtesy of WikiMedia

Emphasis mine. While Powerline and Mark Steyn are concerned w/ the Islamic implications of this, I can’t help being hung up on the numbers. A group of Islamic missionaries is building a mosque to hold 70,000 when the largest church in England only holds 3000. How many people do you think are in attendance at that church every week?

UPDATE: The Times article makes another interesting addition to the story:

The east London complex would have by far the largest capacity of any religious building in Britain. The biggest at present is the Baitul Futuh in Morden, Surrey, which holds about 10,000 worshippers. Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, the largest Christian place of worship, has a capacity of 3,000.

(From the AliIslam site)
It is of note to me that the largest house of worship in Britain, even before the construction of this mosque, dwarfs the largest house of Christian worship.

posted by Ted on Nov 15

(AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

Charles Krauthammer has written an article in Time Magazine covering the riots in France: read it here. (Via RealClearPolitics) He does an excellent job of describing some of social problems currently plaguing Europe. For example he describes the adversaries in the riots as follows:

On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)–young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?

He goes on to describe the current failure of the Europeans to reproduce, the massive immigration of muslims and their exceptional birthrates. Nothing you haven’t read here before, but none-the-less important in understanding the brewing culture clash going on in Europe and the desperate religious state of Europe:

France thus is approaching 10% Muslim. But things do not stand still. Even if there were no further immigration, which is a pipe dream, birth rates alone will soon drastically alter the balance. Muslims have the highest birth rate–three times the rate of non-Muslims–of any demographic group in Europe. The most common name for a newborn in neighboring Brussels is Mohammed. Childbearing rates among non-Muslim Frenchmen are well below replacement levels. The old French, like the rest of Europe, are literally disappearing.

“With current trends,” Professor Bernard Lewis has said, “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.” The future? “Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb [Muslim northwest Africa].” Today’s rioting youth are just a bit ahead of their time in claiming their upcoming patrimony.

Mark Steyn explains the underlying tensions in his most recent editorial on the subject:

…the Continent isn’t multicultural so much as bicultural. There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that’s it: “two solitudes”, as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there’s three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there’s just two - you and the other - that’s generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it’s no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward.

The troubles in Europe are just beginning. I don’t believe these are problems government can effectively solve. Many of you may be wondering how injecting Christianity into a growing Muslim society can do anything but make matters worse. I would respond that part of the reason their is so much hostility toward western Christians is exactly what Krauthammer describes above. The post-christian ideology of Europe (and much of the United States) leads muslims to a corrupted view of Christianity. To most Arab Muslims, your average Frenchman - who has been in a church twice, once to be christened and once to be married - is a Christian. The people of Europe, both Muslim and non desperately need to see real Christianity. They need to see Jesus.

posted by Ted on Nov 2

For those of you interested in details, you can get a fairly complete picture by looking at a couple of different sources. Basically, some young men were killed (in an accident, not by police) when they fled police after tear gas was shot into their mosque. As near as I can tell the reason the tear gas was shot into the mosque remains a mystery, but the riots have gone on now for nearly a week and are spreading to a number of other suburbs and towns around Paris. They seem to involve a lot of setting cars on fire.

CNN notes a compelling fact about the area where the whole thing began:

Clichy, northeast of Paris, is crowded and impoverished and with a large Muslim population. Local officials claim the suburb is one of the poorest in France.
About 60 percent of the residents of Clichy are immigrants who face discrimination and unemployment that runs to 25 percent — more than twice the national average.
Those who work in the community say young people are frustrated and angry.
“There are no factories. There are no jobs for anyone. There are no job centers,” said Mark Nadaud, a volunteer youth counselor.
“And when you go to look for a job and you say you are from here and they don’t want take you.”

And John Hinderaker at Powerline provides an apt reminder:

The Paris riots are just one small part of a worrisome picture. Over much of Europe, chronically slow economic growth has combined with a demographic crisis, comprised of low birth rates and inadequate assimilation of immigrants, to create the potential for explosive social unrest.

I agree largely with John’s assessment, but I think there is a critical element missing. This level of violence is born out of more than high unemployment and a tense social environment. The meager religious climate in Europe is leaving people hopeless. Without Christ they are left feeling unfulfilled and as though their lives are meaningless. This creates a dangerous desperation indeed, and one which is far from limited to a suburb in Paris. We ask for your continued prayers for Europe, for the people of Paris affected by this riot, for the leaders and officials working to resolve it, and your continued prayer for our fundraising so we can get there to help out.