Europe ‘to have more Muslims than Christians’

MUSLIMS will ‘very soon’ outnumber practising Christians in Europe, the Belgian justice minister claimed yesterday.

Koen Geens told the European Parliament the continent ‘does not realise this, but this is the reality’.

At a hearing by MEPs into the Brussels attacks, the Belgian deputy prime minister Jan Jambon added: ‘The worst thing we can do is to make an enemy of Islam.’

Speaking before the Parliament’s justice and home affairs committee yesterday, Mr Geens said the shift in balance between Christians and Muslims was ‘not because there are too many Muslims’ but because ‘Christians are generally less practising’.

Mr Jambon, who also serves as the country’s interior minister, added: ‘We have 600,000 to 700,000 Muslims in Belgium and the overwhelming majority of those people share our values.

‘To make an enemy of all of those people, we really will be creating problems.’ He added that ‘we need to get ... Muslims on our side’ in order to find terrorists and the networks supporting them.

Mr Jambon was accused of stoking tensions with Belgium’s Muslim community after he claimed there was ‘dancing’ by Muslims after the attacks that killed 32 at Brussels airport and an underground station in the city.

In a Belgian newspaper interview on April 16, he also accused Muslim residents of the Molenbeek district of attacking police officers during an operation last month to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam.

Several involved in the Paris and Brussels killings lived in the district, which has a large Muslim population.

A spokesman for Mr Geens last night refused to give evidence for his claims on the number of practising Muslims.

The EU’s statistical body Eurostat does not compile figures on religion, but European Commission figures from 2012 show that 72 per cent of people across Europe identified themselves as Christian compared to two per cent who said they were Muslim. The Washington- based Pew Research Centre last year projected that the number of Muslims in Europe – including Russia and Ukraine – would increase from 43.5 million in 2010 to nearly 71 million in 2050.

The number of Christians was predicted to drop from 553 million to 454 million over the same period.