A Pew study on the world’s Muslim population, summarized here, is now concluded. The full report can be downloaded here with interactive maps. The numbers, broken down by region, should not surprise us:
- Asia and the Pacific: 61.9%
- Middle East/North Africa: 20.1%
- Sub-Saharan Africa: 15.3%
- Europe: 2.4%
- Americas: .3%
What is surprising is that the numbers are generally higher than expected overall. Here are some of Pew’s most interesting findings:
- more than 300 million Muslims live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion; consider India, home to 161 million Muslims (the third largest in the world behind Indonesia and Pakistan) who remain a minority at 14% of the country’s total population
- there are nearly as many Muslims in Ethiopia as there are in Afghanistan
Pew also promises a forthcoming study on the growth of Muslim populations worldwide with future projections. Perhaps this will go a ways towards debunking the Eurabia myth.
