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MARSEILLES, FRANCE -- Iought to be afraid of Basem Tijani. When I asked the slender 23-year-old, dressed in a characteristically Gallic T-shirt and black blazer, whether he considered himself more Algerian or more French, he gave me an answer I've been hearing from guys like him all over North America and Europe: "Actually, I don't see myself as French or Algerian, I just consider myself Muslim. I'm proud to be French, but I'm part of the Islamic nation before anything else."

This sort of attitude, which you might call a kind of religious fundamentalism, is being heard all over the Western world: When you talk to young people who came from Islamic-majority countries (or whose parents did), you increasingly hear them describe themselves as "Muslims" and identify themselves with a broader worldwide community of believers. Their religion has become their primary identity. I must admit that I find it a deeply disagreeable viewpoint.

A lot of people find his attitude not just distasteful but terrifying, especially when it's combined with the observation that Muslims, who make up about 5 per cent of the European population, have many more children than other Europeans and Canadians do.

[snip]

If you examine the statistics, you realize the proper conclusion: Muslims have more babies if they live in places where women don't get much education.

This is the case in Egypt (3.4 children per woman) and Saudi Arabia (6.1), which conform to the Eurabia scare stories. But what about places where women get schooling? Try Turkey: 2.5 children per woman, just above the level needed to keep the population stable. Or Iran: It averaged almost eight children per woman in 1985, and then saw the fastest decline in reproduction in recorded history -- it's now at 2.3, pretty close to the U.S. rate.

What happens when people move from big-family countries to Europe and North America? Justin Vaisse of France's Foreign Ministry analyzed his country's statistics in a major survey and found that their reproduction rate drops dramatically the longer they've been in the West, often falling to below 2.1 -- the rate at which a population remains stable -- within two generations.

So whatever Mr. Tijani may be, he is pretty unlikely to have a huge family, and his religious beliefs are not about to transform into Islamist politics and a craving for sharia law.

Once we get past the hysteria and look at the facts, something becomes apparent about the Muslims: They're just like any group of immigrants, except for the stories we tell about them.

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