3-year mapping project gives surprising insight into Islamic makeup of Asia and Europe
A typical Muslim speaks Arabic and lives in the Middle East.
Most of Europe's Muslims are migrants clustered in the Netherlands and France.
Wrong on both counts.
According to a three-year mapping project on the global Muslim population, by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Asia is home to the majority of Muslims.
And most of Europe's Muslims are in Russia, where they practised Islam as early as the 8th century.
"My hope is that the study will contribute to positive dialogue rather than speculation," said Pew senior researcher Brian Grim. "It's easy for facts to get lost in the discussion of the day."
The Western debate on Muslim migration is indeed overheating, and the Pew's results may come as a reality check.
A front-line issue in Europe and North America, the growth of Islam has sparked a stream of controversial books on the creation of a new "Eurabia," and the overthrow of Western values by fundamentalist Islam.
With the issue so volatile, Pew's researchers found it challenging to collect data in Western countries where censuses don't include religion and Muslims are reluctant to identify themselves publicly. The United States and some West European countries do not tabulate religion, although Canadian censuses do.
"The biggest challenge is to get data on new immigrants," says Grim. "Many aren't yet on the radar of the data collection agencies."
In developing countries, he adds, facts are easier to come by because data is compiled by international aid agencies.
With data from 232 countries and territories, the survey compiled a comprehensive map of the size and distribution of the world's Muslim population.
The results sink some stereotypes. More than 60 per cent of Muslims are in Asia, with only 20 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa. But the latter have the highest percentages of Muslim-majority countries, some of them with Islamic populations of 95 per cent or more.
At the same time, one-fifth of the world's Muslims are minorities in countries dominated by other religions. But their numbers are sometimes greater than those of states where they are in the majority.
"China has more Muslims than Syria," Grim points out.
But it is Europe's 38 million Muslims who have been the most contentious, making up about 5 per cent of the continent's population.
Although 16 million of them are traditional communities in Russia, those in Western Europe are more recent. Germany leads the list of Muslim-populated countries in the region, hosting 4 million Muslims, or 5 per cent of its total population.
France, with 3.5 million Muslims, has a higher concentration, of about 6 per cent, and the Netherlands has about 5.7 per cent, with 946,000.
The growing strength of Muslim communities has led to arguments – often spearheaded by American writers – that Europe has lost its sense of identity, and is allowing itself to be taken over by a minority that could eventually overwhelm it, if not the Western world.
"(Fundamentalist Islam) doesn't flavour (societies) – it transforms, subdues, conquers," Bruce Bawer writes in Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe. "Islam means `submission,' and in its fundamental form it demands nothing less."
Some recent books argue that European liberalism is at stake as Muslim immigration escalates. Others say Islam is delivering a dose of spiritual sobriety to a society of runaway materialism. But few doubt it is on course to change its Western hosts, possibly in dramatic ways.
"It's a key debate that's bound to continue as immigration increases in the foreseeable future," says Paul Freston, chair of religion and politics at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo.
"But it supposes that Muslims are monolithic, when the fact is they speak different languages and practise different forms of Islam."
In the United States, which is less than 1 per cent Muslim, "Islamophobia" rose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the association of Islam and terrorism is still strong enough to be political poison. Foes of President Barack Obama have accused him of being a secret Muslim.
"In America, hostility to Islam is the last form of intolerance that is acceptable," says Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.