Every time this story comes up it gets the same silence or consensual brush-off if anyone tries to draw anything from it. "Of course, it's only that high because the variations of spelling are all included in the same entry," we are told. Or, "Muslims tend to call their male children Mohammed whereas other religions have more variety or names." It would be more honest just to say, "Move along please, nothing to see here." And perhaps there is nothing whatsoever to worry about. Perhaps all those Mohammeds will become fully-fledged modern Brits. Or maybe they will not. But to think that there is not going to be a struggle for them, or to assume that the struggle can only go one way — and that way is forward — is to make a fatal mistake. It is also to ignore Islamic history.

One thing that must strike anyone in their study of Islam is how repeatedly the religion's extremists win out. You can go back a thousand years and study the moment when the Asharite were triumphed over the Mutazilites, when the "men of the sword" beat the "men of the pen". Or you can marvel at Persian society in the early 20th century and at the daring of a scholar like Ali Dashti. And then you can wonder at the fact that he should end up dying in the torture prisons of Khomeini in the ninth decade of his life. Or you can take even the most cursory glance at recent history and consider the direction of Islam's trajectory in Muslim-majority countries around the world today.

If anybody was in any doubt that Islamic history can replay itself they should have had their doubts alleviated by the "Arab Spring". And while it was perfectly understandable that many of those watching events from the liberal West should have greeted the wobbling or overthrow of vicious dictators with enthusiasm (there was little reason to love Zine el Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak, let alone Colonel Gaddafi or Assad junior), in the lack of awareness of what would come next lay a wilful blindness.

It should have been obvious — we should have known — that when strongmen totter in Muslim-majority countries it is not inevitable that the Islamists will come to power, but the odds are at least high that they will. It is not a coincidence but par for an Islamic course that those with the most straightforward and hardline views are not only in a position to take charge when things free up, but in the best position of all. In part because they are the most organised and most committed, they also have the advantage that they are able to lay out an interpretation of their faith which, while sometimes becoming too hardline for the majority when imposed too quickly, has a theological authenticity which believing Muslims find very hard to refute. The extremists may have a bad interpretation of Islam, they may have a wrong interpretation of Islam, but for very many people it is also a perfectly plausible interpretation of Islam. We do not acknowledge this because we do not want to.