Sounds like a Dr. Suess book, doesn’t it?
My question doesn’t have any agenda behind it. I’m just a bit startled to see the publicly quoted number vary so widely.
Months ago, the news constantly spoke of “the world’s 1 billion Muslims”. Direct comparisons appeared in the Washington Post of populations professing various faiths, and the “1 billion” figure was used to show that Christians supposedly just barely outnumbered Muslims.
Now here we are months later and everyone is tossing around the phrase “1.5 billion Muslims”. Are they that prolific? Did we suddenly find half a bil?
The TV show "30 Days " by documentary maker Morgan Spurlock used the 1.5 billion figure at the start – then later in the same show, threw out the phrase “1.4 billion Muslims”. Did they lose track of a hundred million people during the TV show?
I understand that it’s difficult to arrive at an accurate figure…it’s probably hard to define who counts as a “Muslim”, for starters. But the estimates vary by more than the entire population of the United States! Half a billion people is a twelfth of the world’s population. That’s not a trivial number.
What annoys me most is that we cannot seem to stay consistently with whatever figure we arrive at, even in the same TV show.
Does anyone have a firm idea how many there really are? Or any idea why this much-publicized number keeps changing without any admission of error or reason given for correcting it?
Sailboat
About a billion.
It is a lot harder to calculate than you might think. First off, it is hard to find counters who do not have an agenda. Then there is the question if you can trust people to self-report accurately. In some places it might be wise to lie to an official-looking questioner.
Obviously we would have to extrapolate based on educated guesses. But how educated can a guess be as even basic population figures are untrustworthy? Then we have to mix in the ‘Who is a Muslim’ element.
I would guess even honest estimates might well vary by 20%. Twenty percent of a billion is dozens and dozens of people. Maybe even more.
More importantly, I would guess that there can be few honest answers as everyone looking at this sort of thing probably has an agenda.
I suspect the upper figure runs into the issues that Paul in Saudi notes. And of course, countries like Iran are all “officially” Muslim. But there are Christians, Jews, and Baha’i living there. Large non-muslims populations live in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria (not sure about Jordan). If you simply accept the official populations, it’s easy to stretch the world’s Muslim population upwards.
Also, the problem is not unique to Muslims. Try asking how many Christians there are and you run into the same problem. There’s a site called Adherents.com that offers fairly comprehensive statistics for this kind of thing, and seems well cited. They give a figure of 1.3 billion Muslims, though they also note that their numbers “tend toward the high end of reasonable worldwide estimates.”
Part of the problem, of course, lies in the fact that there may be many people who claim Islam as their ancestral faith but are no more active in their faith than, say, the average American or European city-dweller or suburbanite who may claim to be a Methodist or Catholic but rarely if ever attends church or in any way actively practices his faith.
That said, it’s important to remember that the majority of Muslims are not Arabs or even Arabic-speakers, except insofar as they know Arabic to read the Koran.
Countries which are heavily Muslim in population include Indonesia, Malaysia, Albania, Bosnia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, etc. Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, and Senegal, among other nations not generally thought of as Islamic, have large if not majority Muslim populations. I recall hearing the figure quoted that there are more Muslims in India than in any one Arabic-speaking nation. Also recall that there have been heavy immigrations into much of Europe and the U.S. from nations with predominantly-Islamic populations
Pinning a number down from this rather extensive array of countries is more a matter of demographic art than of strict number-crunching.