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IslamQA: Why Muslims becoming secularized is not a big problem

I am so sad and disappointed that many more people are turning into liberals. Even when I'm living in a muslim country i feel like Islam is looked down on. I am glad we still use the law tht the prophet taught us but more and more people wants to separate religion from everything. I'm not ready to live in the future where atheists are right and religious people are wrong 🙁

[Edit: Some people are thinking I am speaking against Muslims being politically liberal or democratic. That has nothing to do with this answer. I am speaking of Muslims who abandon parts of Islam, regardless of their political leanings.]

If you think of one person abandoning conservative Islam for the sake of a secular ideology (I mean Muslims who do not pray regularly and think the hijab is not obligatory, I do not mean liberal in a political sense), that can seem like a tragedy. But if you think of whole populations, then there is actually nothing to fear. Muslim conservatives have higher fertility rates than secular Muslims, which means that the conservative population continues to grow even though many people leave it to become liberal.

We see that in the example of Turkey. In the 20th century, millions of people abandoned traditional Islam and became secularized. Despite that, the number of conservative Muslims did not go down, it actually increased by tens of millions over the century. The same is true in Egypt and every other Muslim-majority country I can think of. People constantly become secularized, but since secular Muslims have fewer children on average, the conservative Muslim population remains stable or grows. Egypt may have never had so many secularized Muslims as it has today–but it also has never had so many conservative Muslims as it has today. And since the secularized Muslims have fewer children, the religiosity of the population as a whole remains stable: with each generation, the conservatives easily replace every Muslim lost to secularization.

In the short-term, it may appear that secularization is a problem. But in the long-term, if you think in terms of generations and centuries, then there is no problem at all. Nowhere in the world is there a trend of the number of conservative Muslims going down.

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