Nearly 1 in 4 people worldwide is Muslim
Thursday, October 8th, 2009(CNN) — Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, accordin
India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.
China has more Muslims than Syria.
Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.
And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.
Nearly two out of three of the world’s Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.
The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world’s Muslims, trail a very distant second.
There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.
There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.
Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.
“Overall, the number is higher than I expected,” he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
The report can — and should — have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of “No God but God.” (more…)
