KEY DEMOGRAPHICS OF MUSLIM-AMERICANS
Gallup Organization interviews with a random sample of 946 Muslim Americans in 2008 shed light on the demographics of this rarely studied group:
RACE: Muslims are the nation’s most racially diverse religious group. At least a third of Muslim-Americans are black mostly converts or children of converts to Islam. “The significant proportion of native-born converts to Islam is a characteristic unique to the United States,” Gallup said. More than a quarter call themselves white, while nearly one in five identified as Asian and about as many classified themselves as “other.”
RELIGIOSITY: Muslim-Americans are more religious than other Americans, but less likely than those in predominantly Muslim countries to say religion plays an important part in their lives 80% of Muslim-Americans compared to virtually all in Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Morocco, for example.
IDEOLOGY: Muslim-Americans are the U.S. religious group most evenly spread out along the political spectrum 29% liberal, 38% moderate, 25% conservative.
PARTISANSHIP: 49% of Muslim-Americans called themselves Democrats, 8% Republican and 37% independent. Gallup found that among all Americans in 2008 34% identified as Democratic, 26% Republican and 33% independent. But voter registration was relatively low among Muslim-Americans.
OTHER DEMOGRAPHICS: Muslim-Americans skew young, with 36% age 18-29, double the rate for the general population. They’re more likely than other Americans to be single. Forty percent have at least a college degree, compared to 29% of Americans overall. Muslims may be slightly more likely than other Americans to report low household income.
Results were subject to sampling error of +/- 4 percentage points for Muslim-Americans, 0.2 points for all Americans
COMPARE CHANGES IN U.S. RELIGIONS OVER 2 DECADES
By Eric Gorski, The Associated Press
The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.
“This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report,” said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of adherents of the world’s second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 billion to 2.2 billion followers.
The arduous task of determining the Muslim populations in 232 countries and territories involved analyzing census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, the report says. In cases where the data was a few years old, researchers projected 2009 numbers.
The report also sought to pinpoint the world’s Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose because so few countries track sectarian affiliation, said Brian Grim, the project’s senior researcher.
As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiites represent between 10 and 13% of the Muslim population, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80% of the world’s Shiite population lives in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.
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% of the world’s Muslims live in Asia.
About 20% live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15% live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4% are in Europe and 0.3% are in the Americas. While the Middle East and North Africa have fewer Muslims overall than Asia, the region easily claims the most Muslim-majority countries.
While those population trends are well established, the large numbers of Muslims who live as minorities in countries aren’t as scrutinized. The report identified about 317 million Muslims — or one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population — living in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
About three-quarters of Muslims living as minorities are concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million).
In several of these countries — from India to Nigeria and China to France — divisions featuring a volatile mix of religion, class and politics have contributed to tension and bloodshed among groups.
The immense size of majority-Hindu India is underscored by the fact that it boasts the third-largest Muslim population of any nation — yet Muslims account for just 13% of India’s population.
“Most people think of the Muslim world being Muslims living mostly in Muslim-majority countries,” Grim said. “But with India … that sort of turns that on its head a bit.”
Among the report’s other highlights:
• 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 sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria).
• Indonesia, which has a tradition of a more tolerant Islam, has the world’s largest Muslim population (203 million, or 13% of the world’s total). Religious extremists have been involved in several high-profile bombings there in recent years.
• In China, the highest concentrations of Muslims were in western provinces. The country experienced its worst outbreak of ethnic violence in decades when rioting broke out this summer between minority Muslim Uighurs and majority Han Chinese.
• Europe is home to about 38 million Muslims, or about five% of its population. Germany appears to have more than 4 million Muslims — almost as many as North and South America combined. In France, where tensions have run high over an influx of Muslim immigrant laborers, the overall numbers were lower but a larger percentage of the population is Muslim.
• Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States although they only make up 0.8% of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about 2% of the total population.
A future Pew Forum project, scheduled to be released in 2010, will build on the report’s data to estimate growth rates among Muslim populations and project future trends.
A similar study on global Christianity is planned to begin next year.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has appointed a special representative to Muslim communities, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Thursday.
Farah Pandith,