Real Numbers | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

New Survey on Islam Calls Into Question Population Figure Used by Obama [Excerpts]

A comprehensive new survey of the world’s Muslim population finds that nearly one in four people on the planet is an adherent of Islam, but the number of Muslims it gives for the United States is significantly smaller than those routinely cited by Islamic organizations – and used by President Obama in his Cairo speech last June.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says its latest report contains “the most up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the size and distribution of the worldwide Muslim population.”

Its lead finding is that there are 1.57 billion Muslims living in the world today, or about 23 percent of the estimated 6.8 billion world population. Of those, about 60 percent are in Asia and 20 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. The Sunni-Shia ratio comes down at roughly 9:1.

More than 38 million Muslims live in Europe – about five percent of the total population – including more than four million in Germany and 3.5 million in France. At 5.7 percent, the European Union country with the biggest proportion of Muslims is the Netherlands…

When it comes to the U.S., however, the Pew survey offers a figure significantly smaller than those favored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other organizations. Pew says there are 2.454 million Muslims in the U.S., about 0.8 percent of the country’s total population.
 
Last year, the American Religious Identification Survey conducted by scholars at Trinity College found the number of American adults self-identifying as Muslims to be 1.3 million, up from 1,1 million in 2001.

But also in 2008, by contrast, a Newsweek article previewing Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to the U.S. made reference to “the nation’s eight million Muslims.”

The Islamic Society of North America states in its press releases that there are “more than seven million Muslims in the United States,” while CAIR releases have also included the assertion that “there are an estimated seven million Muslims in the United States.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/55214