God in Government: Pew Maps Muslim Populations Worldwide - On Faith at washingtonpost.com
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
If you are interested in the concentrations of Muslim populations worldwide, take a look at the cool (or alarming, depending on your perspective) interactive graphic produced by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center.
Using proportionate bubbles, it maps the size of Muslims communities worldwide. It’s part of Pew’s big demographic study of the global Muslim population, which finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages and that one in four people living today is Muslim.
(By way of comparison, most estimates put the worldwide Christian population in excess of 2 billion, making up one-third of the world population.)
But back to the graphic. While 80 percent of the world’s Muslims live in countries where Muslims are the majority, some Muslims communities that are minorities in their homeland are larger than in countries that we traditionally think of as Muslim. The study found that more than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of the Muslim population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
For example:
- China has almost the same number of Muslims as Saudi Arabia.
- Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined.
- Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.
- India has one of the world’s largest concentrations of Muslims.
- Of countries with Muslim populations, the U.S. has one of the smallest.
These numbers “aren’t necessarily unknown,” says Pew Forum senior researcher Brian J. Grim. “But to look at the world and see where the large populations of Muslims live is astounding.”
What does this mean politically? A lot. In some countries, the proportion of Muslims is enormously sensitive. In Nigeria, where the sizes of the Muslim and Christian communities are enormously sensitive, census questions to determine people’s faith have caused riots and deaths.
But this study is just the beginning for Pew, says Alan Cooperman, the Pew Forum’s associate director for research. It is the beginning of an ambitious project to map the world’s religions and explore their growth and the attitudes of their adherents. Pew’s next phase is to project population growth among Muslims 10 and 20 years from now. Those numbers will be released next year.
Pew also recently completed face-to-face interviews with 19,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa (where the vast majority of people are either Christian or Muslim), where they were questioned about religious beliefs, practices, pocketbook issues, the degree of overlap between the majority religions, traditional religious beliefs and attitudes of Muslims and Christians towards each other.
Pew is also mapping the Christian population, its projected growth country-by-country, and Christians’ beliefs and practices. Then it will will move onto the other major world religions, said Cooperman.
For anyone interested in the spread of particular faiths, world strife, and for those looking for a sense of what this world will look like in the coming decades, the Pew reports will be essential reading.
God in Government: Pew Maps Muslim Populations Worldwide - On Faith at washingtonpost.com