Back in 1992 a fellow traveler and I were on assignment for a travel magazine in Cairo, Egypt. We concocted a goofy experiment. We would stand back to back on a busy street, and one of us would holler, “Mohamed!” Then we’d count the number of men who turned to look. There were usually no fewer than a half-dozen. Pretty funny, huh?

Well, today you could conduct the same experiment in London or Amsterdam or Paris with similar results, say some pundits. They point to the rapid encroachment of Islam into Europe and the creation of a mysterious place fraught with danger called “Eurabia”:

Muhammad is the second most popular name for newborn boys in Britain, if you add together the various spellings. In the Seine-St-Denis suburb of Paris, Mohamed is number one. In the four biggest Dutch cities in 2005, either Mohamed or Mohammed came top.

Facts like these have led some pundits to forecast the Islamicisation of Europe – a future “Eurabia”. Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islam, cited the immigration from Muslim countries and relatively high birth-rates of immigrants as trends that mean “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest.”

Not so, say others who study the issue. They argue that these are emotional assessments made based on biases and assumptions, not statistics:

Nominal Muslims — whether religious or not — account for 3 to 4 percent of the European Union’s total population of 493 million. Their percentage should rise, but far more modestly than the extreme predictions. That is chiefly because Muslims, both in Europe and the main “emigrating countries” of Turkey and north Africa, are having fewer babies.

“Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe,” says Jytte Klausen, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies European Muslims. Few European states ask citizens about religious beliefs. Estimates based on national origins suggest that 16 million nominal Muslims live in the EU. There are about 5 million in France, 3.3 million in Germany and 1.5 million to 2 million in the U.K.

But isn’t it in the best interest of organizations whose job it is to convince us that there is a threat among us to exaggerate the numbers? If there’s a growing percentage of Muslims in the general population, it goes without saying that there’s a percentage of them who are bad eggs, who want to blow up our buses and subways, poison our water supplies, murder our women and children because Allah tells them to.

But actually:

The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts there will be between 23 million and 38 million Muslims in the EU in 2025 — 5 to 8 percent of the population. But after 2025 the Muslim population should stop growing so quickly, given its falling birth-rate. In short, Islamicisation — let alone sharia law — is not a demographic prospect for Europe.

Too bad. I was kind of intrigued by the idea of vacationing in exotic Eurabia.

Calling all Mohameds!