After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants — more than half of whom came illegally — the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings and the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates.

The wave of Mexican immigration to the U.S. could resume as the U.S. economy recovers. But even if doesn’t, it has already secured a place in the record books. The U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world. Some 30% of all current U.S. immigrants are Mexican-born.

Beyond its size, the most distinctive feature of the modern Mexican wave has been the unprecedented share of immigrants who have come to the U.S. illegally. Just over half (51%) of all current Mexican immigrants are unauthorized, and some 58% of the estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. are Mexican.

Read the full report for full details on these subjects:

• Migration between the U.S. and Mexico
• Mexicans sent back to Mexico by U.S. authorities
• U.S. immigration enforcement
• Mexico, by the numbers
• Characteristics of Mexican-born immigrants in the U.S.

Nearly half of these migrants (49%) are Christians, and the top country of origin has been Mexico, followed by Russia and the Ukraine where borders changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second-largest group of migrants are Muslims (27%), among whom the largest share has come from the Palestinian territories, followed by Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

Jewish migrants represent a smaller share of the total number of those who have crossed international borders to a new destination country. But relative to their numbers, they have by far the highest level of migration compared with other religious groups. About one-quarter of Jews alive today have left their birth country and now live somewhere else.

While migrants come from a very diverse and widespread array of countries, the vast majority end up immigrating to a relatively few areas — North America, Europe, Australia and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Read the full report for detailed findings on migration patterns among religious groups.

You can also find these features:

• Interactive map
• Sortable data tables
• Quiz

Census Bureau rules state that people are to be counted in their “usual residence” as of April 1, meaning the place where they live and sleep most of the time. After the 2000 Census, analysis by the Census Bureau suggested that the U.S. population may have been over-counted for the first time in history because of the many people who were tallied more than once. Because of the many duplicate enumerations resulting from people who were counted in two different homes (“households,” in census parlance), the Census Bureau invested extra effort and publicity in trying to avoid this type of error in the 2010 Census. Snowbirds — people who live in cold states or other countries for most of the year, but move to warm states for the winter — were one focus of this effort.

One major step the bureau took was to add a screening question to the 2010 Census form, asking whether each person in the household sometimes lives or stays somewhere else; if the answer was yes, the form included individual check-boxes for “in college housing,” “in the military,” “at a seasonal or second residence,” “for child custody,” “in jail or prison,” “in a nursing home” and “for another reason.” Census Bureau staff planned to contact households for follow-up if the screening question raised a red flag.

Here’s the question as it appears on the interactive version of the 2010 census form.

The world’s Muslim population is expected to increase by about 35% in the next 20 years, rising from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.2 billion by 2030, according to new population projections by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Globally, the Muslim population is forecast to grow at about twice the rate of the non-Muslim population over the next two decades — an average annual growth rate of 1.5% for Muslims, compared with 0.7% for non-Muslims. If current trends continue, Muslims will make up 26.4% of the world’s total projected population of 8.3 billion in 2030, up from 23.4% of the estimated 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.

While the global Muslim population is expected to grow at a faster rate than the non-Muslim population, the Muslim population nevertheless is expected to grow at a slower pace in the next two decades than it did in the previous two decades. From 1990 to 2010, the global Muslim population increased at an average annual rate of 2.2%, compared with the projected rate of 1.5% for the period from 2010 to 2030.

These are among the key findings of a comprehensive report on the size, distribution and growth of the global Muslim population. The report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life seeks to provide up-to-date estimates of the number of Muslims around the world in 2010 and to project the growth of the Muslim population from 2010 to 2030. The projections are based both on past demographic trends and on assumptions about how these trends will play out in future years. Making these projections inevitably entails a host of uncertainties, including political ones. Changes in the political climate in the United States or European nations, for example, could dramatically affect the patterns of Muslim migration.

If current trends continue, however, 79 countries will have a million or more Muslim inhabitants in 2030, up from 72 countries today.¹ A majority of the world’s Muslims (about 60%) will continue to live in the Asia-Pacific region, while about 20% will live in the Middle East and North Africa, as is the case today. But Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the country with the single largest Muslim population. The portion of the world’s Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise; in 20 years, for example, more Muslims are likely to live in Nigeria than in Egypt. Muslims will remain relatively small minorities in Europe and the Americas, but they are expected to constitute a growing share of the total population in these regions.

In the United States, for example, the population projections show the number of Muslims more than doubling over the next two decades, rising from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, in large part because of immigration and higher-than-average fertility among Muslims. The Muslim share of the U.S. population (adults and children) is projected to grow from 0.8% in 2010 to 1.7% in 2030, making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States today. Although several European countries will have substantially higher percentages of Muslims, the United States is projected to have a larger number of Muslims by 2030 than any European country other than Russia and France. (See the Americas section of the full report for more details.)

In Europe as a whole, the Muslim share of the population is expected to grow by nearly one-third over the next 20 years, rising from 6% of the region’s inhabitants in 2010 to 8% in 2030. In absolute numbers, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to grow from 44.1 million in 2010 to 58.2 million in 2030. The greatest increases — driven primarily by continued migration — are likely to occur in Western and Northern Europe, where Muslims will be approaching double-digit percentages of the population in several countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, Muslims are expected to account for 8.2% of the population in 2030, up from an estimated 4.6% today. In Austria, Muslims are projected to reach 9.3% of the population in 2030, up from 5.7% today; in Sweden, 9.9% (up from 4.9% today); in Belgium, 10.2% (up from 6% today); and in France, 10.3% (up from 7.5% today). (See the Europe section of the full report for more details.)

Several factors account for the faster projected growth among Muslims than non-Muslims worldwide. Generally, Muslim populations tend to have higher fertility rates (more children per woman) than non-Muslim populations. In addition, a larger share of the Muslim population is in, or soon will enter, the prime reproductive years (ages 15-29). Also, improved health and economic conditions in Muslim-majority countries have led to greater-than-average declines in infant and child mortality rates, and life expectancy is rising even faster in Muslim-majority countries than in other less-developed countries. (See the section on Main Factors Driving Population Growth in the full report for more details. For a list of Muslim-majority countries and definitions for the terms less- and more-developed, see the section on Muslim- Majority Countries.)

Growing, But at a Slower Rate

The growth of the global Muslim population, however, should not obscure another important demographic trend: the rate of growth among Muslims has been slowing in recent decades and is likely to continue to decline over the next 20 years, as the graph below shows. From 1990 to 2000, the Muslim population grew at an average annual rate of 2.3%. The growth rate dipped to 2.1% from 2000 to 2010, and it is projected to drop to 1.7% from 2010 to 2020 and 1.4% from 2020 to 2030 (or 1.5% annually over the 20-year period from 2010 to 2030, as previously noted).

The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries, including such populous nations as Indonesia and Bangladesh. Fertility is dropping as more women in these countries obtain a secondary education, living standards rise and people move from rural areas to cities and towns. (See the Related Factors section in the full report for more details.)

The slowdown in Muslim population growth is most pronounced in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East-North Africa and Europe, and less sharp in sub-Saharan Africa. The only region where Muslim population growth is accelerating through 2020 is the Americas, largely because of immigration. (For details, see the charts on population growth in the sections of this report on Asia-Pacific, Middle-East-North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Americas.)

Falling birth rates eventually will lead to significant shifts in the age structure of Muslim populations. While the worldwide Muslim population today is relatively young, the so-called Muslim “youth bulge” — the high percentage of Muslims in their teens and 20s — peaked around the year 2000 and is now declining. (See the Age Structure section of the full report for more details.)

In 1990, more than two-thirds of the total population of Muslim-majority countries was under age 30. Today, people under age 30 make up about 60% of the population of these countries, and by 2030 they are projected to fall to about 50%.

At the same time, many Muslim-majority countries will have aging populations; between 2010 and 2030, the share of people ages 30 and older in these countries is expected to rise from 40% to 50%, and the share of people ages 60 and older is expected nearly to double, from 7% to 12%. Muslim-majority countries, however, are not the only ones with aging populations. As birth rates drop and people live longer all around the globe, the population of the entire world is aging. As a result, the global Muslim population will remain comparatively youthful for decades to come. The median age in Muslim-majority countries, for example, rose from 19 in 1990 to 24 in 2010 and is expected to climb to 30 by 2030. But it will still be lower than the median age in North America, Europe and other more-developed regions, which rose from age 34 to 40 between 1990 and 2010 and is projected to be age 44 in 2030. By that year, nearly three-in-ten of the world’s youth and young adults — 29.1% of people ages 15-29 — are projected to be Muslims, up from 25.8% in 2010 and 20.0% in 1990.

Other key findings of the study include:

Worldwide

• Sunni Muslims will continue to make up an overwhelming majority of Muslims in 2030 (87%- 90%). The portion of the world’s Muslims who are Shia may decline slightly, largely because of relatively low fertility in Iran, where more than a third of the world’s Shia Muslims live.

• As of 2010, about three-quarters of the world’s Muslims (74.1%) live in the 49 countries in which Muslims make up a majority of the population. More than a fifth of all Muslims (23.3%) live in non-Muslim-majority countries in the developing world. About 3% of the world’s Muslims live in more-developed regions, such as Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

• Fertility rates in Muslim-majority countries are closely related to women’s education levels. In the eight Muslim-majority countries where girls generally receive the fewest years of schooling, the average fertility rate (5.0 children per woman) is more than double the average rate (2.3 children per woman) in the nine Muslim-majority countries where girls generally receive the most years of schooling. One exception is the Palestinian territories, where the average fertility rate (4.5 children per woman) is relatively high even though a girl born there today can expect to receive 14 years of formal education.

• Fewer than half (47.8%) of married women ages 15-49 in Muslim-majority countries use some form of birth control. By comparison, in non-Muslim-majority, less-developed countries nearly two-thirds (63.3%) of all married women in that age group use some form of birth control.

Asia-Pacific

• Nearly three-in-ten people living in the Asia-Pacific region in 2030 (27.3%) will be Muslim, up from about a quarter in 2010 (24.8%) and roughly a fifth in 1990 (21.6%).

• Muslims make up only about 2% of the population in China, but because the country is so populous, its Muslim population is expected to be the 19th largest in the world in 2030.

Middle East-North Africa

• The Middle East-North Africa will continue to have the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Of the 20 countries and territories in this region, all but Israel are projected to be at least 50% Muslim in 2030, and 17 are expected to have a population that is more than 75% Muslim in 2030, with Israel, Lebanon and Sudan (as currently demarcated) being the only exceptions.

• Nearly a quarter (23.2%) of Israel’s population is expected to be Muslim in 2030, up from 17.7% in 2010 and 14.1% in 1990. During the past 20 years, the Muslim population in Israel has more than doubled, growing from 0.6 million in 1990 to 1.3 million in 2010. The Muslim population in Israel (including Jerusalem but not the West Bank and Gaza) is expected to reach 2.1 million by 2030.

• Egypt, Algeria and Morocco currently have the largest Muslim populations (in absolute numbers) in the Middle East-North Africa. By 2030, however, Iraq is expected to have the second-largest Muslim population in the region — exceeded only by Egypt — largely because Iraq has a higher fertility rate than Algeria or Morocco.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• The Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by nearly 60% in the next 20 years, from 242.5 million in 2010 to 385.9 million in 2030. Because the region’s non- Muslim population also is growing at a rapid pace, Muslims are expected to make up only a slightly larger share of the region’s population in 2030 (31.0%) than they do in 2010 (29.6%).

• Various surveys give differing figures for the size of religious groups in Nigeria, which appears to have roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians in 2010. By 2030, Nigeria is expected to have a slight Muslim majority (51.5%).

Europe

• In 2030, Muslims are projected to make up more than 10% of the total population in 10 European countries: Kosovo (93.5%), Albania (83.2%), Bosnia-Herzegovina (42.7%), Republic of Macedonia (40.3%), Montenegro (21.5%), Bulgaria (15.7%), Russia (14.4%), Georgia (11.5%), France (10.3%) and Belgium (10.2%).

• Russia will continue to have the largest Muslim population (in absolute numbers) in Europe in 2030. Its Muslim population is expected to rise from 16.4 million in 2010 to 18.6 million in 2030. The growth rate for the Muslim population in Russia is projected to be 0.6% annually over the next two decades. By contrast, Russia’s non-Muslim population is expected to shrink by an average of 0.6% annually over the same period.

• France had an expected net influx of 66,000 Muslim immigrants in 2010, primarily from North Africa. Muslims accounted for an estimated two-thirds (68.5%) of all new immigrants to France in the past year. Spain was expected to see a net gain of 70,000 Muslim immigrants in 2010, but they account for a much smaller portion of all new immigrants to Spain (13.1%). The U.K.’s net inflow of Muslim immigrants in the past year (nearly 64,000) was forecast to be nearly as large as France’s. More than a quarter (28.1%) of all new immigrants to the U.K. in 2010 are estimated to be Muslim.

The Americas

• The number of Muslims in Canada is expected to nearly triple in the next 20 years, from about 940,000 in 2010 to nearly 2.7 million in 2030. Muslims are expected to make up 6.6% of Canada’s total population in 2030, up from 2.8% today. Argentina is expected to have the third-largest Muslim population in the Americas, after the U.S. and Canada. Argentina, with about 1 million Muslims in 2010, is now in second place, behind the U.S.

• Children under age 15 make up a relatively small portion of the U.S. Muslim population today. Only 13.1% of Muslims are in the 0-14 age group. This reflects the fact that a large proportion of Muslims in the U.S. are newer immigrants who arrived as adults. But by 2030, many of these immigrants are expected to start families. If current trends continue, the numbers of U.S. Muslims under age 15 will more than triple, from fewer than 500,000 in 2010 to 1.8 million in2030. The number of Muslim children ages 0-4 living in the U.S. is expected to increase from fewer than 200,000 in 2010 to more than 650,000 in 2030.

• About two-thirds of the Muslims in the U.S. today (64.5%) are first-generation immigrants (foreign-born), while slightly more than a third (35.5%) were born in the U.S. By 2030, however, more than four-in-ten of the Muslims in the U.S. (44.9%) are expected to be native-born.

• The top countries of origin for Muslim immigrants to the U.S. in 2009 were Pakistan and Bangladesh. They are expected to remain the top countries of origin for Muslim immigrants to the U.S. in 2030.

About the Report
This report makes demographic projections. Projections are not the same as predictions. Rather, they are estimates built on current population data and assumptions about demographic trends; they are what will happen if the current data are accurate and the trends play out as expected. But many things — immigration laws, economic conditions, natural disasters, armed conflicts, scientific discoveries, social movements and political upheavals, to name just a few — can shift demographic trends in unforeseen ways, which is why this report adheres to a modest time frame, looking just 20 years down the road. Even so, there is no guarantee that Muslim populations will grow at precisely the rates anticipated in this report and not be affected by unforeseen events, such as political decisions on immigration quotas or national campaigns to encourage larger or smaller families.

The projections presented in this report are the medium figures in a range of three scenarios — high, medium and low — generated from models commonly used by demographers around the world to forecast changes in population size and composition. The models follow what is known as the cohort-component method, which starts with a baseline population (in this case, the current number of Muslims in each country) divided into groups, or cohorts, by age and sex. Each cohort is projected into the future by adding likely gains — new births and immigrants — and subtracting likely losses – deaths and emigrants. These calculations were made by the Pew Forum’s demographers, who collaborated with researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria on the projections for the United States and European countries. (For more details, see Appendix A: Methodology.)

The current population data that underpin this report were culled from the best sources available on Muslims in each of the 232 countries and territories for which the U.N. Population Division provides general population estimates. Many of these baseline statistics were published in the Pew Forum’s 2009 report, Mapping the Global Muslim Population, which acquired and analyzed about 1,500 sources of data — including census reports, large-scale demographic studies and general population surveys — to estimate the number of Muslims in every country and territory. (For a list of sources, see Appendix B: Data Sources by Country.)

All of those estimates have been updated for 2010, and some have been substantially revised. (To find the current estimate and projections for a particular region or country, see Muslim Population by Country, 1990-2030.) Since many countries are conducting national censuses in 2010-11, more data are likely to emerge over the next few years, but a cut-off must be made at some point; this report is based on information available as of mid-2010. To the extent possible, the report provides data for decennial years — 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020 and 2030. In some cases, however, the time periods vary because data is available only for certain years or in five-year increments (e.g., 2010-15 or 2030-35).

The definition of Muslim in this report is very broad. The goal is to count all groups and individuals who self-identify as Muslims. This includes Muslims who may be secular or nonobservant. No attempt is made in this report to measure how religious Muslims are or to forecast levels of religiosity (or secularism) in the decades ahead.

Find the full report including interactive maps and sortable data tables at pewforum.org.

 _{1. The seven countries projected to rise above 1 million Muslims by 2030 are: Belgium, Canada, Congo, Djibouti, Guinea Bissau, Netherlands and Togo.}

On Sept. 15, 2010, a group of scholars discussed key findings of a new study, “Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe,” published by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.The study examines several of the oldest, largest and most influential Muslim groups operating in Western Europe today, many of which are virtually unknown to non-Muslims.

Speakers:
Peter Mandaville, Visiting Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and Director, Center for Global Studies, George Mason University
Dilwar Hussain, Director, Policy Research Centre, Islamic Foundation
Maha Azzam, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Moderator: Claire Spencer, Middle East andNorth Africa Programme, Chatham House

In the following edited excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript and the accompanying report at pewforum.org.

Peter Mandaville, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

I’d like to point out at the beginning that this project never aimed to be comprehensive in terms of providing an analysis of every single Muslim group or organization that you’re going to find in Europe. Rather, the idea was to take the longest-established, most significant broad networks and movements whose origins lie in the Muslim-majority world but who over the last few decades have established a presence in Europe, and to tell the story of that transplantation, that adaptation and what has happened to their agendas, their visions and their activities as they’ve adapted to the very different circumstances and conditions that they’ve found in Europe.

I’m going to give a very short summary of these movements. I also want to draw out and identify what we have taken to be some of the major cross-cutting analytical themes that come out of the research that we’ve done.

What we did essentially was to commission from 12 leading scholars, the vast majority of whom are based in Europe, in-depth case studies of these groups and movements. These case studies will be published later next year as a full-edited volume. Then, based on these studies and working alongside a wonderful set of colleagues at the Pew Forum, we assembled and distilled that material into the report that you have before you today.

Our geographic scope is confined to Western Europe. We are essentially talking about the EU 15, plus Norway and Switzerland, in our coverage. The vast majority of examples that we’ve drawn on and studied relate to the three large contexts of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. The associated demographic material, if you’re interested, is available on the Pew Forum’s website.

A great many of [these groups] have received considerable analysis and scrutiny in recent years. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to assay something like a comprehensive mapping of the landscape and fuller terrain of Muslim movements and networks in Europe. Part of what we’re trying to do is to draw the attention of a broad readership of the report to not only specific groups and movements, but indeed the relationships between them.

The idea is that you only really get a full understanding of some of these groups by understanding the broader landscape and terrain that they inhabit, particularly in terms of the nature of their relationships with other Muslim groups and movements in the milieu that they inhabit. The point is that some of the things they do and some of the things they say are shaped by the relationships they have and the ways they position themselves vis-à-vis other Muslim groups and movements. While a good many of these groups, particularly those that fall in the radical or jihadi category, have received a lot of attention — perhaps not unfair to say fairly obsessive attention of late — some of the groups that we deal with here are not known necessarily to a broad readership.

The second point is really one that I think is going to be fairly obvious to most of you in this room, which is to say that an account of the presence of Muslim movements and networks in Europe is not simply a story about radicalization. It’s not simply a story about terrorism, although that conversation tends to, for obvious reasons, dominate much of the public discussion of these issues.

 Fethullah Gülen

Rather, we thought there would be value in precisely laying out and putting before an audience this broader landscape, not to suggest that the radicalization/terrorism-related issues are not important, but to actually say that one can develop a better understanding of the radicalization phenomena by looking at those groups in relationship to those who inhabit Muslim public space behind them. We look at the Fethullah Gülen movement, largely an educational initiative based on and driven by the followers of the Turkish reformer, scholar, educational entrepreneur, Fethullah Gülen. Present for several decades now, his followers have initiated and established 1,000 or more schools across many countries all over the world, from South America to East Asia, and indeed certainly here in Europe.

The group also has any number of affiliated institutions and bodies in Europe, schools that they’ve established, particularly in Germany. The group has certainly been the subject of any number of controversies, some of this relating to the question of whether there is some sort of political agenda that lies behind what is outwardly largely an educational approach, an emphasis on intercultural dialogue. Those of you who are familiar with the sensitivities around secularism in Turkey, the current debates about the government and the role of the Gülen movement in the Turkish political scene will immediately know exactly what this sort of controversy has been about.

A Muslim woman at a rally in London on July 17, 2005, organized by the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain.

We also then look at the Muslim Brotherhood, and in roughly the same category — the Islamist category, the Jama’at-i Islami — groups whose origins lie in the Middle East and South Asia, respectively. They’ve been on the scene and evolved considerably over a number of decades.

What’s been very interesting to us in terms of looking at this phenomenon in Europe is precisely the question of how these groups have adapted and changed over the course of the multiple generations found within Europe’s Muslim communities. The original, transplanted organizations produce successor groups that depart somewhat from but also preserve elements of the original flavor and ideologies even as they attempt to adapt their agendas. And of course there’s the persistent public scrutiny that has plagued some of these groups as this process has played out.

Groups that were marked originally by the label of “Islamist,” with all that that entailed in terms of their political ideology, faced the question of whether and how this agenda has adapted. A good many of these groups certainly have played a role in encouraging Muslims to get politically involved in the societies in which they live. In other cases, however, there have been concerns raised about their impact on issues such as social cohesion and about continued ties to political violence.

A very interesting coalition was formed in the run-up to the Iraq war between the Muslim Association of Britain, the British group most closely operating in the mold of the Brotherhood, and the Stop the War Coalition. Several successive protests came out of it.

Secretary General of the Muslim World League Abdullah bin Abdul Mohsin al Turki speaks during the opening of the World Conference on Dialogue in Madrid on July 16, 2008.

Perhaps the group that is least known about in terms of details that we cover in the report are the large transnational, largely Saudi-funded da’wa organizations — the Muslim World League and the World Association of Muslim Youth. Again, they’ve been around for some decades now, largely identified with efforts by Saudi Arabia to promote the rather conservative Wahhabi brand of Islam, and played an important role from the 1970s and ’80s onward in terms of providing support and funding for the establishment of any number of Muslim organizations, mosques, publication efforts here in Europe.

These two groups are engaged in a wide range of activities. On many occasions, their work and activities have overlapped with some of the other groups that we deal with in the movement, most notably, the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is perhaps a moment to point to one of the bigger issues that we try to tackle here in the report. We think that there’s value in trying to lay out these different strands and pathways of social movement and network activity, precisely because there is often a tendency to lump together groups that will at times collaborate and work with each other, even though their ultimate agendas and visions may diverge in the large picture.

We also offer up the possibility that some of these groups may be waning in terms of their influence — those that fall within the transnational da’wa category, precisely because the flavor of Islam, the Salafi Wahhabi variant, that they provided access to is now available quite directly to those who wish to access it through any number of websites associated with prominent international Salafi scholars.

We, of course, pay some considerable attention to the impact and role of radical Islamists, jihadi groups. We do make the distinction in our work between violent and nonviolent radical groups, so on the one hand, cells that are affiliated with broader global jihadi groups, such as al Qaeda and Abu Hamza al-Masri’s Supporters of Shari’a, as well as individual, “self-starter” militants who are inspired by the grand narrative of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda “brand.”

Members of Hizb ut-Tahrir stage an anti-war demonstration outside the London Conference on Afghanistan, held at Lancaster House on Jan. 28, 2010.

Then we also give some attention to nonviolent radical groups, most notably the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will of course be familiar to many of you in this room. Here, for example, is a photo taken earlier this year at a Hizb ut-Tahrir protest about the ongoing U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We also give some attention in the report to traditional Sufi orders. These are groups that have been around in many regards for centuries. We consider them to be important because they do define particular social structures — solidarity networks, ways of connecting and bringing the relevance of religion into everyday life.

A traditional Sufi ceremony takes place in a prayer room in Rahovec, Kosovo.

One of the issues that we give attention to in the report is the debate that has gone on in recent years about where Sufism and Sufi groups fit into the counter-radicalization agenda. There was a time in the heady days of 2005 when there was a lot of talk in the air about the idea that Sufi groups were nice, cuddly Muslims that governments worried about radicalization should embrace because they were going to serve as an antidote to the radicals.

When you drill down and gain a better understanding of some of the Sufi groups, the idea that Sufism is a cuddly apolitical thing does not necessarily match with the reality. [Take], for example, a figure located in the U.K., Shaykh Faizul Aqtab Siddiqi, who is interestingly the shaykh, the head of a particular Sufi order, and simultaneously one of the figures at the forefront of the movement that seeks to build lines of connectivity between shari’a law — Islamic arbitration councils — and the British civil courts. He was also a figure who was a moving force behind the large protests in 2006 during the Danish cartoon crisis.

The Tablighi complex in the British town of Dewsbury.

We look at the Tablighi Jama’at, again, a group that’s not necessarily widely known. [B]y some estimates [it is] the largest Muslim movement in the world, whose annual congregations in South Asia are attended literally by millions. They have a large presence in Europe, particularly here in the U.K., in West Yorkshire, Dewsbury. Also in France, also in Spain.

This is a group, the vast majority of whose members are really focused on issues of personal religiosity — piety — but a group that’s also been the subject of some recent controversy with respect to its plans to build what was kind of styled as a mega-mosque here in London. There also have been nagging concerns that some elements of this group, particularly its leadership in certain parts of South Asia, have ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Finally, we have looked at some of the networks that have been built around particularly significant and salient religious scholars — scholars who work primarily in a jurisprudential mode, who offer legal opinions, who pronounce on the issues of the day and who seek to organize, in the realm of legality, the ways in which European Muslims approach and deal with the challenges thrown up to them by the specific issues they encounter. These are figures such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the figure behind the European Council for Fatwa and Research based in Dublin.

We look at groups such as the al-Khoei Foundation, based here in London. And we also raise this question of whether we’re seeing the rise of a new set of competitors who don’t necessarily carry the same sort of formal credentials as religious scholars but who have emerged in recent years, particularly through new media channels — satellite television, the internet, Facebook — as competitors to formal religious scholarship by packaging variants of popular “self-help” Islam. Here we give a little bit of attention to the Egyptian televangelist, Amr Khaled, based now in the U.K., and the recently controversial Mumbai-based popular preacher, Zakir Naik, who many of you will know was banned from the U.K. earlier this year.

As you can see when we lay this all out before you, there is a very diverse array of agendas and primary realms of activity associated with these movements, from education to the dispensation of fatwas to broad emphasis on religious observance to lobbying and advocacy to outright revolutionary politics — a wide range of activity that we’re talking about here.

One of the issues that appeared to us fairly quickly is the fact that — and this is borne out by some recent sociological studies that have been done — many of these movements are not particularly large in terms of formal membership. People are not necessarily card-carrying members, if you will, of the Muslim Brotherhood, or card-carrying members of the Tablighi Jama’at.

Indeed, their influence doesn’t work according to the standard patterns of organizational membership. A lot of these groups, despite low levels of formal membership, have often had fairly high levels of influence in terms of shaping the debate, shaping the public discussion of these sorts of issues. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir are particularly significant here because they have tended to emphasize the need for Muslim communities to engage in geopolitical issues, to have something to say about the struggles and conflicts that Muslims around the world have faced. So they have done a lot of the work of organizing the debate and the discussions in the public space.

We’re also telling a story of agendas originally sculpted in relation to the circumstances of the Muslim-majority world, sometimes in the very early post-colonial periods, that have adapted, to varying degrees, in the process of transplantation to Europe. We see different ways that this plays out.

In the case of the Tablighi Jama’at, the core focus on personal piety is actually very portable. It travels very easily and it’s not surprising that anywhere in the world that you find Muslims, you always find some presence of the Tablighi Jama’at.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a group founded around the agenda of the Islamization of public space, the establishment of states based on Islamic law. This is an agenda that has undergone some movement, some reconsideration, to varying degrees. The whole question of what it means to be a member of the Brotherhood in a political context defined by the Western liberal state has been the subject of enormous controversy within this movement itself. So around this issue you can see any number of offshoot organizations and factions emerging that have wanted to take that project in very different sorts of directions.

I think most interesting, at least to me in terms of the work I’ve done, has been the question of generational differences. What has happened to these groups as a second and then a third generation of Muslims born and raised in Europe has sought to define their relationship to these groups, to understand what the relevance of these groups might be to the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis?

It’s not been lost on us that some of these groups are marked by certain ethnic and sectarian characteristics that often speak to the circumstances of their original founding. And something that’s been interesting in the younger generation are some initial moves, I think, to try to move beyond the ethnic and sectarian boundaries that have sometimes separated these groups.

I think there also has to be posed a set of questions about the extent to which these groups will continue to be relevant in the longer and medium term. In the 1960s, the ’70s, the ’80s — the periods when these groups first appeared in Europe — many times they were the only games in town. They were the groups that organized Muslim space.

That’s no longer the case. There are now any number of home-grown European Muslim organizations out there that are speaking directly to the specific concerns that young people have. The agendas of some of these groups simply are, I think, largely irrelevant to a good number of young Muslims, who are offered a wide range of alternative visions, understandings of religion, and agendas around social activism, and the manifestation of religiosity in public space by new voices and competitors to old guard movements that they find in new media spaces.

And then finally, there is the question of the relationship between government engagement and these movements. If government is to engage with these groups, one doesn’t engage for the sake of engagement. One engages to some end. What sorts of end points do both government groups and the Muslim movements we’re talking about see of value in that relationship?
The question of the extent to which good government — the reaching out, helping hand of government — what impact does that have on the credibility and legitimacy of groups whose activities and discourse government would like to foster? Government agencies are often working in a relative information vacuum and have to rely on often very superficial understanding of these movements, their histories and their origins.

Of course, the fact is that a good many of these groups are ambiguous in terms of what they’re about, what their ultimate agendas are, and it’s not simply a question of groups with secret agendas hiding agendas. It’s as much a question of the fact that within these groups, you find a great many different agendas. [I]t becomes very easy, for example, to conflate the ideas and agenda of a particular prominent individual who happens to be associated with a group with that group as a whole, and it’s just simply not always accurate to do so.

So that in a very sort of shorthand form gives you a sense of the major themes that have come out of this report.

Find the full transcript and the accompanying report at pewforum.org

Over the past two decades, the number of Muslims living in Western Europe has steadily grown, rising from less than 10 million in 1990 to approximately 17 million in 2010.¹ The continuing growth in Europe’s Muslim population is raising a host of political and social questions. Tensions have arisen over such issues as the place of religion in European societies, the role of women, the obligations and rights of immigrants and support for terrorism. These controversies are complicated by the ties that some European Muslims have to religious networks and movements outside of Europe. Fairly or unfairly, these groups are often accused of dissuading Muslims from integrating into European society and, in some cases, of supporting radicalism.

To help provide a better understanding of how such movements and networks seek to influence the views and daily lives of Muslims in Western Europe, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life has produced profiles of some of the oldest, largest and most influential groups — from the Muslim Brotherhood to mystical Sufi orders and networks of religious scholars. The selected groups represent the diverse histories, missions and organizational structures found among Muslim organizations in Western Europe. Certain groups are more visible in some European countries than in others, but all of the organizations profiled in the report have global followings and influence across Europe.

The profiles provide a basic history of the groups’ origins and purposes. They examine the groups’ religious and political agendas, as well as their views on topics such as religious law, religious education and the assimilation of Muslims into European society. The profiles also look at how European governments are interacting with these groups and at the relationships between the groups themselves. Finally, the report discusses how the movements and networks may fare in the future, paying special attention to generational shifts in the groups’ leadership and membership ranks as well as their use of the Web and other new media platforms in communicating their messages.

It is important to note that the report does not attempt to cover the full spectrum of Muslim groups in Western Europe. For instance, it does not include profiles of the many Muslim organizations that have been founded in Western Europe in recent decades, including local social service providers, or the governing councils of major European mosques. Rather, the primary focus of the report is on transnational networks and movements whose origins lie in the Muslim world but that now have an established presence in Europe. Influential Islamic schools of thought, such as Salafism or Deobandism, are discussed in terms of their influence on various Muslim groups and movements rather than in separate profiles.²

Perceptions About Links to Terrorism

Muslims have been present in Western Europe in large numbers since the 1960s, when immigrants from Muslim-majority areas such as North Africa, Turkey and South Asia began arriving in Britain, France, Germany and other European nations, often to take low-wage jobs.³ Many of the major Muslim networks and movements operating in Western Europe today originated in Muslim-majority countries, including Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The overseas origins of the groups, and their continuing ties to affiliates abroad, have prompted concerns that by strengthening Muslims’ connections to the umma — the world community of Muslim believers — they may be encouraging Muslims to segregate themselves from the rest of European society.⁴ In addition, some in the West perceive many Muslim groups as fomenters of radical Islam and, ultimately, terrorism.

It is difficult to generalize about Muslim groups in Western Europe because they vary so widely in their philosophies and purposes. Certain groups, including radical Islamist movements, do work to foster extremist sentiments or to detach Muslims from the European societies in which they live. But other groups focus on different goals, such as helping Muslim communities deal with day-to-day religious issues, improving schools or encouraging personal piety.

The profiles in this report provide a sense of whether the core philosophy and goals of each group tend to tilt toward or away from Islamic radicalism or extremism, as well as the extent to which they encourage Muslims to integrate into European society, participate in local and national politics and cooperate with non-Muslims on social and political matters. Whenever possible, the report notes instances where questions have been raised in the press, scholarly journals or government sources about a group’s possible terrorist links or connections. But the report does not attempt to answer the question of whether particular groups and movements are directly or indirectly tied to terrorism. For one thing, it is often impossible to tell. While individuals with violent or radical inclinations may participate in a particular group’s activities, the group itself may or may not do anything to foster violence or extremism.

Furthermore, many European Muslims see these movements and networks as generically “Islamic” and may not care about or even be aware of their political ideologies and social agendas. Individuals also may support or participate in some of a group’s activities but not others. For instance, individuals attending a religious class sponsored by an organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood may not necessarily support the group’s broader political agenda. Some studies have shown that exclusive affiliation with a single group or movement is rare, especially among younger Muslims.⁵ Rather, European Muslims often participate in the activities of multiple groups, sometimes simultaneously.

Likewise, some people are drawn to particular groups principally because of their ethnic or regional origins rather than their social or political viewpoints. For example, the movement known as Jama’at-i Islami appeals primarily to South Asian Muslims, while the Muslim Brotherhood appeals primarily to those of Arab descent. However, there are signs that the ethnic character of some groups and movements is becoming less pronounced, at least among younger generations of Muslims.⁶

Small Membership, Large Influence

Although many Muslims in Western Europe participate in the activities of these movements and networks, the groups’ formal membership rolls appear to be relatively small. Indeed, some studies suggest that relatively few Muslims in Europe belong to any religious organization in any formal sense, including mosques.⁷

Despite their relatively low levels of formal membership, Muslim movements and networks often exert significant influence by setting agendas and shaping debates within Muslim communities in Western Europe. Whether or not they reflect the views of most Muslims in a community, they often are instrumental in determining which concerns receive attention as “Muslim issues” in the media, in government circles and in the broader public debate about Islam in Europe.

In addition, many Islamic groups now serve as interlocutors between Muslims and the governments of the European countries in which they live. This arrangement has often come about at the behest of government officials looking for organizations that can serve as conduits to their Muslim constituents. A number of European governments have established councils in recent years to reach out to their Muslim populations. For instance, in 2003, the French government partnered with a number of large Muslim groups to establish the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (French Council of the Muslim Faith), which now serves as an official representative body for the country’s Muslims in dealing with the government in much the same way that certain Catholic and Jewish organizations in France serve as official points of contact for their respective communities.

Pursuing Their Agendas

The growing connections between Islamic groups and European governments, as well as the integration of some of these groups into the continent’s political mainstream, have not led to a decrease in activism on the part of these groups. If anything, Muslim groups and movements have become more visible on the European political stage and are becoming more adept at using national media and political channels to pursue a wide range of agendas. For example, the Muslim Association of Britain, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, became a major player in Britain’s anti-Iraq war movement by partnering with disaffected members of the British Labor Party and the Stop the War Alliance.

Even groups that advocate for Muslim political causes often do so by working within, rather than outside of, Europe’s legal and political institutions. Most of the movements — including the politicized ones, such as the Muslim Brotherhood — encourage their followers to participate in local and national European elections. The Muslim Association of Britain, for example, routinely publishes lists of candidates — both Muslims and non-Muslims — who have been endorsed by the group.

Many Muslim movements have embraced the tools afforded by new media, including websites, Twitter, blogs, online videos and social networking sites, to reach new followers. Web destinations such as Facebook and YouTube are replete with content from Muslim groups spanning the ideological spectrum. The groups’ messages — sometimes coming in the form of hip-hop music, graphic novels, sports programs and other popular-culture formats — are designed to appeal to young Muslims raised in Western Europe.

Radical groups such as al Qaeda have used websites to propagate the views of jihadi scholars and, according to some analysts, to recruit potential activists.⁸ But groups that focus on promoting personal devotion, such as the Tablighi Jama’at and traditional Sufi orders, also have used the Web to promote themselves, uploading videos of their conferences and creating Facebook pages dedicated to their key leaders.⁹

While the internet has made it easier for groups to share their messages, it also has raised new challenges. Because of the prevalence of new media outlets, individual Muslims are able to receive information from a variety of religious groups, which potentially dilutes the message and influence of any single group.

At the same time, the internet and other new technologies have allowed Islamic groups in Europe to reach Muslims worldwide. Some European-based groups are now exporting ideas, methods and money back to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere. European affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, are engaged in ongoing discussions with intellectuals and ideologues in the Middle East about participation in democratic politics. And radical groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose global headquarters are in the Middle East, rely on their European branches for publicity and fundraising.

Partly in reaction to the growth and visibility of Muslim movements in Western Europe, Christian and Jewish organizations in the region also have attracted more public attention in recent years and taken on renewed relevance in the eyes of some Europeans.¹⁰ In that sense, Muslim groups, collectively, may be helping to create more space for religion in general in the European public square.

About the Report

This report consists of seven profiles of the movements and networks listed below. The report also includes a glossary of terms, brief “snapshots” of each group and an appendix on the presence of these Muslim groups in North America.

• Gülen Movement
• Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’at-i Islami
• Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth
• Radical Islamist Movements: Jihadi Networks and Hizb ut-Tahrir
• Sufi Orders
• Tablighi Jama’at
• Networks of Religious Scholars

Read the full report, view an interactive table of the number of Muslims in Western Europe and see an interactive map of the distribution of Muslims in Western Europe at pewforum.org.

More than 1,000 immigrants have been evacuated from southern Italy after a recent wave of violence against African farm workers. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project over the past decade find that anti-immigrant sentiment is widespread in Italy.

For example, in 2007, Italians overwhelmingly said that immigration was a big problem in their country and that immigrants — both from the Middle East and North Africa and from Eastern European countries — were having a bad impact on Italy. More recently, in the fall of 2009, more than eight-in-ten Italians said they would like to see tighter restrictions on immigration.

Italians were more likely than any other public included in the 47-nation survey conducted in 2007 to see immigration as a big problem in their country. More than nine-in-ten Italians (94%) considered immigration to be a big problem, including 64% who said it was a very big problem in Italy.

By comparison, a much narrower majority of South Africans (53%) — the second most likely to rate immigration as a very big problem in their country — shared that view.

Majorities of Italians across demographic and regional groups saw immigration as a very big problem, but those who lived in the northern parts of the country were especially likely to say that was the case.

About three-quarters (74%) of those who lived in the north saw immigration as a very big problem in Italy, compared with 54% in the south, where the recent violence has been concentrated.

Most Say Immigrants Have a Negative Influence

Italian opinion about the influence immigrants were having on their country was also among the most negative of the 47 nations surveyed in 2007.

Nearly three-quarters of Italians (73%) said immigrants had a bad impact on their country; only in South Africa was this view as widespread — 75% of South Africans said immigrants had a negative influence on their country.

Italy was the only country of the Western European nations surveyed where a majority viewed the impact of immigrants negatively. Publics in Britain, France, Germany and Spain were divided, while the Swedes had an overwhelmingly positive view of the influence immigrants had on their country.

While the recent anti-immigrant violence has been directed at Africans, Italians expressed equally negative views of immigration from Eastern European countries as they do about immigration from the Middle East and Africa. Two-thirds said it was a bad thing that people from the Middle East and North Africa come to live and work in Italy; an equal number said the same about immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Only about one-in-five Italians saw immigration from the Middle East and Africa and Eastern Europe as a good thing for Italy (20% and 22%, respectively).

Germans were also largely unwelcoming of immigrants. Solid majorities in Germany said it was bad that people from the Middle East and North Africa (64%) and from Eastern Europe (58%) moved to their country.

Opinions were more mixed in Spain and France, while many more in Britain and Sweden said immigration from the Middle East and North African and from Eastern European countries was a good thing than said it was a bad thing.

Support for Tighter Immigration Controls

Given Italians’ concerns about immigration and negative views about key immigrant groups, it is not surprising that public opinion in that country is overwhelmingly in favor of tighter restrictions on immigration.

A fall 2009 survey found that more than eight-in-ten Italians (83%) agreed that “we should restrict and control entry into our country more than we do now,” including 40% who completely agreed with the statement.

Majorities in the other Western European countries included in the 2009 poll also expressed support for tougher restrictions on immigration. About eight-in-ten in Spain (80%) and Britain (78%) shared that view, as did 65% in Germany and 64% in France.

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.

While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, more than half of the 20 countries and territories¹ in that region have populations that are approximately 95% Muslim or greater.

More than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. These minority Muslim populations are often quite large. India, for example, has the third-largest population of Muslims worldwide. China has more Muslims than Syria, while Russia is home to more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined.

Of the total Muslim population, 10-13% are Shia Muslims and 87-90% are Sunni Muslims. Most Shias (between 68% and 80%) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.

These are some of the key findings of Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population, a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. The report offers the most up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the size and distribution of the worldwide Muslim population, including sectarian identity.

Previously published estimates of the size of the global Muslim population have ranged widely, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.² But these commonly quoted estimates often have appeared without citations to specific sources or explanations of how the figures were generated.

The Pew Forum report is based on the best available data for 232 countries and territories. Pew Forum researchers, in consultation with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists at universities and research centers around the world, acquired and analyzed about 1,500 sources, including census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, to arrive at these figures — the largest project of its kind to date. (See methodology for more detail.)

The Pew Forum’s estimate of the Shia population (10-13%) is in keeping with previous estimates, which generally have been in the range of 10-15%. Some previous estimates, however, have placed the number of Shias at nearly 20% of the world’s Muslim population.³ Readers should bear in mind that the figures given in this report for the Sunni and Shia populations are less precise than the figures for the overall Muslim population. Data on sectarian affiliation have been infrequently collected or, in many countries, not collected at all. Therefore, the Sunni and Shia numbers reported here are expressed as broad ranges and should be treated as approximate.

These findings on the world Muslim population lay the foundation for a forthcoming study by the Pew Forum, scheduled to be released in 2010, that will estimate growth rates among Muslim populations worldwide and project Muslim populations into the future. The Pew Forum plans to launch a similar study of global Christianity in 2010 as well. The Pew Forum also plans to conduct in-depth public opinion surveys on the intersection of religion and public life around the world, starting with a 19-country survey of sub-Saharan Africa scheduled to be released later this year. These forthcoming studies are part of a larger effort — the Global Religious Futures Project, jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation — that aims to increase people’s understanding of religion around the world.

Continue reading the full report online, including a series of interactive demographic maps, or download a complete PDF of the report at pewforum.org.

_{1 For a definition of “territories,” see the methodology.
2 See, for example, CIA World Factbook; Foreign Policy magazine, May 2007; Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, 2008; Adherents.com; and IslamicPopulation.com.
3 See, for example, IslamicWeb.com; “Shia Muslims in the Middle East,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 2006; and “The Revival of Shia Islam,” Vali Nasr speaking at a Pew Forum event, July 2006.}