Islam rapidly expanding in Hungary

According to magyaridok.hu, the Hungarian intelligence services indicated several years ago that the number of the followers of Islam has grown rapidly in recent times and it may mean a threat to national security.

They informed the government in their analysis regarding to the immigration report of Europol that according to the 2011 census, twice as many declared themselves to be adherents of Islam than 10 years earlier, which also calls for increased attention for the prevention and the intelligence. The analysis mentions that Hungary is at most a transit country or resting place for Jihadists until they arrive in Western Europe, but by the spreading of Islam, they can find an increased number of helpers in Hungary.

The latest census data in Hungary strengthen the analysis as well. According to the Central Statistical Office (KSH), 5579 people classified themselves to the Islamic religion four years ago in 2011. Of them, 3567 were men and 2012 were women. Ten years earlier, however, only 3201 people declared themselves Muslims. The men were 2222 and there were only 979 women, or half as many as ten years later. This is also meaningful because while the number of practitioners of Islam almost doubled in 10 years, Christian churches have fewer adherents. The number of Catholics made up 54% of the total Hungarian population in the 2001 census, their number exceeded 5.5 million. However, the 2011 data shows a significant drop, because by this time, only 39% of the population, 3.8 million people identifies themselves as Catholic. Half a million fewer people declared themselves Calvinist after 10 years, the number of Lutheran believers dropped from 314 thousand to 215 thousand. The number of those who declared themselves as Israelites also became less by 2011, when 3 thousand fewer people chose Jewish religion, magyaridok.hu wrote.

Additionally, the proportion of the adherents of Islam grows the most among the churches which can increase their membership. There are several confessions where the adherents became a couple of thousand more, but these numbers are significantly lower than the growth of Islamic believers. It has even greater significance in the fact that while in 2001, 1.1 million people of the 10 million 198 thousand Hungarian population did not want to answer the religious question, in 2011, 2.7 million of 9.937 million people did not want to say which denomination they belong to.

based on the article of magyaridok.hu
translated by BA

Source: http://magyaridok.hu