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Mapping the world’s Muslim population

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A new study by the Pew Research Center challenges Western assumptions that the Arab world is home to the majority of the world’s Muslims. Actually, it’s Asia. Anchor Marco Werman finds out more from The World’s Religion Correspondent Jane Little.

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MARCO WERMAN: There’s a tendency in the Western world to think of the terms Arab and Muslim as synonymous. But the truth is that the Arab world is only a small part of the larger Muslim world.  A new study from the Pew Research Center put some numbers on that reality. The study is called “Mapping the Global Muslim Population.” And among its findings is this: only 20 percent of the world’s Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa. The majority, 60 percent, live in Asia. The World’s religion correspondent Jane Little has been studying the Pew survey for us. Jane, for you, what’s the most striking thing about this study?

JANE LITTLE: Well I think, really, this is a very in-depth and broad study. A quite authoritative study. I think the fact that the top ten largest Muslim populations are led by Indonesia, Pakistan and India. And only one of the top ten, that’s Egypt at number five, is in the Arab Middle East. As you suggested, we’ve often tended to conflate Muslim with Arab. And this study shows how false that is.

WERMAN: Right. And do you know what the methodology of the study was? Did the Pew survey simply go out and ask people whether they thought they were Muslim, or identified themselves as Muslim?

LITTLE: It’s taken three years to compile. And they’ve used 1500 sources, lots of census data, population surveys, demographic studies. And basically yes, they have taken self identification. If someone says they’re a Muslim then they’re counted as Muslim.

WERMAN: The top three Muslim populations by country are Indonesia, Pakistan and India. India’s pretty surprising, having the third largest Muslim population in the world.

LITTLE: Yes. It is very striking, that. We tend to think of India as Hindu. It is, in fact, overwhelmingly Hindu, but it has a huge population, over a billion, and 161 million Muslims live in India. That’s twice as many as Egypt’s population. Over twice as many as Iran’s. So that is a really striking figure.

WERMAN: Jane, let’s take a quick look, about what the survey says about Islam in two places where the faith has grown in recent years. Europe, and the U.S. First, Europe. What are the trends in Muslim demographics there?

LITTLE: Well, one of the interesting things is there’s been a lot of hot air recently about a demographic time bomb. Some studies and newspapers have suggested the Muslim population is growing massively and Muslims are taking over Europe. Of course, they’re very heavily loaded, these studies. And this is sort of a cool, calm look at the data. It doesn’t estimate growth rates, that’s a future study. But basically there are 38 million Muslims in Europe according to this study, they make up five percent of the European population and two percent of all the world’s Muslims. And the vast majority of them…like, in Russia, there are 16 million Muslims in Russia. And they account for more than four in ten of all European Muslims. And one of the interesting things the study points out is that most Muslims in Western Europe are relatively recent immigrants. Germany has a large population of four million, France does with just behind that, between three and four. But a lot of Muslims who live in Europe: Russia, Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Bosnia, they’re old populations. Centuries old. And the study points out more than six in ten European Muslims are in fact indigenous.

WERMAN: Yes, you mentioned Germany, I mean, Germany has almost as many Muslims as all of the United States. What is the picture for America?

LITTLE: The whole of the Americas, North and South, have 4.6 million Muslims according to this, and more than half of them live in the U.S. 2.5 million Muslims.

WERMAN: Now, I don’t think the survey was supposed to come to any great conclusions. It’s basically telling us a lot of things we already knew. But I’ve kind of got to say, one in four people in the world is Muslim, so what?

LITTLE: Yes. You could say, “So what?” I think one of the interesting things though, is that there’s always been a lot of politicization of studies and a lot of competition for souls in Africa, for instance, between Christianity and Islam. This is an authoritative study that says there are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. At the moment there are estimates there are over 2 billion Christians in the world, and in fact the Pew Forum plans to go ahead and do a similar study of Christianity next year. And it also plans to look at Muslim population growth. This will take a much closer look and project what the future is for Islam in the world.

WERMAN: That’s The World’s Religion Correspondent, Jane Little, in London.

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