Mexico is a predominantly Christian country, with adherents of Islam representing a small minority. Due to the secular nature of the state established by Mexico’s constitution, Muslims are free to proselytize and build places of worship in the country. The country has a population of around 126 million as of 2020 census and according to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population was 60,000 in 1980, 111,000 in 2010, and is predicted to be 126,000 in 2030; however, according to the 2010 National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) census, there were only 2,500 individuals who identified Islam as their religion. Most Muslims are foreign nationals and the majority are Sunni.
Notice that the official numbers were much lower than the claimed numbers. Most of the Muslims were foreign nationals.
Yet, Mexico may have over a million Lebanese (almost all of whom are Christian),
What we see here is the all too common phenomena of Muslims exaggerating their numbers. Those few Muslims in Mexico may be temporary converts who will become Evangelical or revert to Catholicism in the following year. Mexico, like much of Latin America is in the midst of an Evangelical Revival. Evangelicals may not be growing as rapidly in Mexico as in the other Latin American countries, but they are still growing.
The thing to remember is that, while the Muslim population in Mexico is miniscule, the Arab-Mexican (Christian) population is very large, in the millions. And the Arab-Mexican Christians are significant. Think of Carlos Slim and Salma Hayek. Getting figures for them is unreliable, however, because a lot of them have moved to the United States.
In the case of Islam, practically speaking, Mexico has almost no Muslims. There are exceptions.
Chile is turning against Israel, thanks to a left-wing government, with a left wing president, Gabriel Boric, with a powerful Palestinian-Chilean community.
However, Argentina has just elected a center-right politician, Javier Milei, who is thoroughly fascinated with both Israel and Judaism.
Presidente Milei supports Israel.
So let’s go over some basics.
– There are 46 million Argentines.
– There are roughly 4 million Argentines with a degree of Arab ancestry. However, many of them are attenuated in their Arabness, being only one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth Arab, and so on.
– Most of the Arab-Argentines are Christian. They were descended from Syrians and Lebanese whose ancestors fled Muslim tyranny. These Lebanese and Syrian Arab Christians did not often have an anti-Israel prejudice, per se, as they often view the Mideast through a Christian vs. Muslim lens. Whereas Chile’s Arab tend to be Palestinians, who, even though mostly Christian, are hostile to Israel.
– Contrary to official statistics. the few Muslims who made it to Argentina, tended to convert, marry out, or lapse in their Islamic observance. Hence the official numbers for the Muslims in Argentina are grossly exaggerated.
The Jewish community in Argentina is about 180,000, the seventh largest Jewish community in the world. It tends to be centered in Buenos Aires. There was also an agricultural community in Moisés Ville.
They have had a massive effect on Argentina’s history, culture, and music. A lot of tangos were written by Jews.
So while Chile, and much of Latin America, is turning against Israel, the Argentine government is not. The dynamic is interesting to follow.
The problem is that Chile is a very successful country, a first world country, and a leader in South America, while Argentina, though bigger – and with a much greater potential – has a history of instability and poor government.
But here is an interesting aside of a video, which describes the Villa Crespo neighborhood in Buenos Aires as an Argentine Shtetls (Jewish towns).
Posted on YouTube: September 1, 2022
The video can be auto-translated, using the settings options.
As important as the Jews are in Argentina, they were once more powerful. During the dictatorship, from 1976-83, in Argentina, many Jews fled to Israel. The population dropped from approximately 300,000 to 180,000.
However, that number may not include the children of intermarriage, who might have a Jewish father, but a Christian mother. And if one includes the Christian relatives of these Jews, the numbers would still be around 300,000, or a little under 1% of the country.
Posted on YouTube: December 9, 2022 Note: There were some Muslim immigrants, but not a half million.
Muslims tend to exaggerate.
The largest immigrant strains were:
1) The Italians (who ended up speaking Spanish, because the Spanish got there first)
2) The Spanish
3) The French
4) The Germans
5) Arabs (most of whom were Christian, and usually the Muslims among them dropped out of Islam)
5) Other Europeans like the Ukrainians, and yes, British, Irish, and Scandinavians
Officially – on paper – there are lots of Muslims in Argentina: supposedly half a millions (by descent, not immigration). However, most of those Muslim Argentines tend to intermarry into a branch of Christianity, or drift into non-observance, or convert themselves.
Such people may not officially change their affiliation on paper.
This video explains it.
(The video is set to the right time.) This imam admits that the official figure
of half a million Muslims in Argentina is ridiculous.
Argentina assimilates/converts Muslims very well.
Posted on YouTube: September 22, 2015
Islamic clerics like to boast of higher numbers than they really have. If someone was born to Muslim parents, they are counted as Muslim even if they never attended a mosque, or if they converted out.
Arab immigration to Argentina was quite considerable in the late 19th century, after World War I and up to the mid-20th century , having become its third most important immigration wave. Of these immigrants, 40% are estimated to have been Muslims or children or grandchildren of Muslims.
Forty percent of Argentina’s Arabs had one Muslim ancestor, yet Argentina’s Arabs are only about 10% Muslim today, if even that. Even then, most Argentine Muslims are not practicing at all. This means a steady translation over to Christianity, whether by conversion, intermarriage, or just simple neglect.
That is the real ongoing situation concerning Islam in Argentina … and in the rest of Latin America.
The religion that IS growing in Argentina is Evangelical Christianity.
On top of that, Argentina has just elected a president sympathetic to Israel.
The basic pattern in South America is basically this.
A) The vast majority of Arabs who immigrated to Latin America were Christians (often fleeing some form of Muslim persecution).
B) Those Muslims who did arrive usually intermarried with Christians, converted to Christianity, or had their children raised Christian.
C) Those who remained Muslim were often not practicing. Until recently, there was nothing in Latin America which facilitated an Islamic lifestyle.
D) Until the 1980s-90s, when Arab oil subsidies floated in, Islam in Latin America – which was incredibly small to begin with – almost died out.
E) So the numbers for Muslims in South America are often inflated, not taking into account those who dropped out.
F) The rise of Evangelical Christianity is winning the spiritual battle in Latin America.
AND NEVER FORGET — The statistics for Muslims can often be horribly exaggerated.
There are small cells of Hezbollah; but while worrisome, they are few in number, often just drug smugglers raising cash for their cause.
Meanwhile, Argentina has blacklisted Hezbollah, because of attacks on Argentine soil. And the border region of Brazil, Argentine, and Paraguay (the Triple Frontier) was worrisome for a while, but the FBI and Mossad went down there and helped the locals clean it up. Again, it was mostly smuggling to raise cash.
However, Islamic penetration into the general population is very small.
3 January 2024 – Edited: Made corrections. Improved writing.
The vast majority of the Arab immigrant population arrived at the beginning of the 20th century, from what are now the nations of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, followed by some Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan and Jordanian families; It could be said that about 80% were of Orthodox or Catholic Christian faith, while only 20% were Muslim. This, while contradicting the demographic distribution of the Arab world, has a reason: Arab ethnic-religious minorities were systematically persecuted and oppressed by the Ottoman Empire, which controlled almost the entire Middle East at that time, until World War I.
It is interesting to note that this Bolivian Arab site admits that the reason that Christian Arabs immigrated to South America was that they were being persecuted by Ottoman Turkish (Muslim) Authorities.
They seem to be in denial, blaming it all on the Turks. Yes, the Ottoman Turks discriminated against Christians; but Islamic governments discriminated against Christians before and after the Ottoman Turkish Empire ruled. The persecution was a Muslim, not just a Turkish, practice.
As noted, the demographic patterns of immigration were similar to that of other Latin American countries … heavily leaning towards Christian, even though the Arab world is majority Muslim.
The Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announces a decision to cut oil exports to the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.
…
Eventually, the price of oil quadrupled, causing a major energy crisis in the United States and Europe that included price gouging, gas shortages, and rationing.
The world was thrown into a crisis, and the Arab oil states got filthy rich. They could not do this today, given America’s oil production from fracking.
By 1974, Arab Muslims felt empowered, and I suspect they sent an imam to Bolivia with the idea of introducing Islam to a country that was almost Muslim-free except for a few isolated individuals.
One Muslim leader named in the OSC report is Mahmud Amer Abusharar, founder of the Centro Islamico Boliviano (CIB) in Santa Cruz. Abusharar emigrated from the Palestinian territories in 1974 and claims to have built Bolivia’s first mosque in 1994 so that he would not lose touch with his religion.
My note: Wikipedia reports that imam Abusharar died in 2011.
Now, Santa Cruz has an Islamic Center and a mosque. And La Paz – one of Bolivia’s two capitals, the other being Sucre – has a mosque since 2004. Quite an achievement for a Muslim community that all but did not exist before 1974. The worries about foreign intrigues are well founded.
According to the Bolivian website, there are 70,000 Bolivians of Arab descent.
[W]e can estimate with a reasonable error that there are approximately 70,000 Arab descendants living in Bolivia.
Yet, for all of this, Bolivia still has very few Muslims today (around 2,000), which is not that much out of a Bolivian population of approximately 12 million. Roughly 1 in 6,000.
Nor is it much out of the 70,000 Arab-Bolivians (only about 3% of Arab-Bolivians). It is safe to assume that the Muslim presence was far, far less in the 1970’s, as there seemed to be no Muslim institutions in Bolivia at all prior to that time.
Most of the Muslims who did immigrate to Bolivia, prior to the 1970’s, either converted or their children did. The Arab community in Bolivia was – and still is – almost totally Christian.
Regarding religion, although the majority [of the Arab immigrants] were Orthodox or Catholic Christians, plus a few Muslims, practically all would end up converting to Roman Apostolic Catholicism sooner or later, in the absence of other centers of Christian sects in Bolivia, at that time.
Below is a picture of the Islamic Center built in Santa Cruz (Click). It was founded in 1986, and I suspect it has some connection to Club la Unión Árabe de Santa Cruz which seems to have built the website.
Santa Cruz – Islamic Center
The image was taken in 2014.
It seems that the Islamic Center was probably subsidized by Islamic interests. Had it not been subsidized, I suspect Islam would have never risen above the presence of a few isolated individuals and visiting businessmen. According to Wikipedia, most of those associated with the Bolivian Islamic Center are immigrants. From that, we can assume that apart from the Islamic Center, any new Arab immigrants to Bolivia would have repeated the past example of conversion to Christianity.
Putting it all together, it follows that the Islamic Center was set up to subsidize an infusion of Islam into Bolivia, possibly extremist Islam.
We can infer that while Arabs are a glorious presence in Bolivia, Islam is an unnatural intrusion, subsidized by outside interests.
But let’s break from that, and finish up with standard Arab Bolivians, who are almost always Christian.
Chile’s ArabTV talked with some Arab Bolivians.
About Arab-Bolivians, but broadcast on Chile’s ArabTV.
posted on YouTube: September 8, 2020
This is in Spanish, but it there is an option to have it translated to English.
1) Click Settings Wheel and choose Subtitles/CC.
2) Click to turn on: Spanish (auto-generated) .
3) Click – for a second time – to turn on: Subtitles/CC(1) Spanish (auto-generated) .
4) Click auto-translate.
5) Choose English – THIS CAN BE TRICKY – I suggest using up and down arrows to chose English, and then press Enter.
This can be very touchy, and you may have to play with it, but it works. Once you get the hang of it, you can turn the option on in a few seconds.
