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Issue 74
Igniting the Spirit of Islam
Oct 2009
Europe is home to about
There’s a lot of speculation of just how many people in the world are Muslim. Here are the figures according to a report by the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life. The size of the Muslim population has long been the subject of guesswork, with estimates ranging up to 1.8 billion. According to the report, there are 1.57 billion Muslims around the world, meaning that nearly one in four people practises Islam. Islam is the world's second largest religion, not far behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion followers.
Syria, and Russia has more than Jordan and Libya combined. Britain has 1,647,000 Muslims - 2.7 per cent of the UK population, and 0.1 per cent of the global Muslim population. (South Africa has about 2 million Muslims, or around 3.8 per cent of the population). The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia - more than 60 per cent of the world's Muslims live in Asia. Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population 203 million, or 13 per cent of the world's total. About 20 per cent of Mus-
The project presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For example, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more than
Islamic Focus
lims live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4 per cent in Europe and 0.3 per cent in the Americas.
38 million or about five per cent of its population. Germany has more than 4 million Muslims - almost as many as North and South America combined. In France, the overall numbers were lower but a larger percentage of the population is Muslim. Two-thirds of all Muslims live in 10 countries. Six are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey), three are in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco) and one is in subSaharan Africa (Nigeria). Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States making up 0.8 percent of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about two percent of the total population.
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