Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020

12. Religion in the Middle East and North Africa

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

As of 2020, the Middle East-North Africa region – the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is home to 440 million people, up 24% since 2010. Muslims make up the vast majority of the region’s population (94%). There is no other major geographic region with such a high concentration of a single religion. While most of the world’s Muslims live elsewhere, the Middle East-North Africa region is the only large region with a Muslim majority.

Christians are the largest minority group in the region, representing 3% of its population, and they are heavily concentrated in Egypt. Fewer than 2% of residents in the Middle East-North Africa region – or 7 million people – are Jewish, almost all of whom live in Israel.28 Hindus, Buddhists, religiously unaffiliated people and adherents of other religions – many of whom are Druze living in Lebanon and Israel – each make up less than 1% of the region’s population.

Gulf Cooperation Council countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have attracted non-Muslim migrants, boosting the absolute numbers of several religious groups in the broader region.

Table showing 94% of people in the Middle East-North Africa region are Muslims, as of 2020

Religious change

Every group grew in number (or count) between 2010 and 2020. The region’s small Hindu population grew the most rapidly (up 62%), followed by the even smaller religiously unaffiliated population (up 41%). Meanwhile, Muslims grew to 414 million (up 24%), and the Jewish population grew to nearly 7 million (up 18%). Christians increased their numbers to an estimated 13 million (up 9%), the lowest growth rate in the region.

There were only small changes in the percentage (or share) of people represented by each group in the region. The largest change was a 0.4-point decrease in the share that Christians make up of the region’s total population.

Substantial change within countries

Lebanon and Oman are the only two countries in the Middle East-North Africa region that experienced a substantial change (of at least 5 percentage points) in a religious group’s share of their overall population.

How is ‘substantial change’ defined?

This section highlights countries that experienced substantial change in the size of their religious populations between 2010 and 2020. We focus on cases where a religious group’s share of a country’s population grew or shrank by at least 5 percentage points. We set that threshold because wide variations in data sources make it difficult to test the statistical significance of differences in population estimates in 2010 and 2020. Refer to the Methodology for details.

In Lebanon, the share of the population that is Muslim rose to 68% (up 5 points), while the Christian population declined by about the same amount, to 28% of all residents of Lebanon. Much of the change was due to a large influx of Muslim refugees from Syria. Lebanon hosts the second-largest number of Syrian refugees (after Turkey) and has the highest concentration of Syrians relative to its population size – roughly one-in-five residents of Lebanon is a Syrian refugee. But the decline in the Christian share of Lebanon’s population also results from a decrease in the absolute number of Christians residing in the country.

Table showing Christians shrank while Muslims grew as a share of Lebanon’s total population

In Oman, the share of the population that is Muslim declined to 82% (down 8 points). Hindus and Christians made up rising shares of Oman’s population from 2010 to 2020 as a result of immigration, especially from India. Over the decade, immigrants accounted for most of Oman’s overall population increase of 1.8 million.

Median age of religious groups

The Middle East-North Africa region has a relatively young population, with a median age of about 25. The only major region of the world with a younger population is sub-Saharan Africa.

Table showing Muslims are younger than Jews in the Middle East and North Africa

Muslims tend to be younger than Jews in the Middle East and North Africa; Jews living in the region (primarily in Israel) had a median age of about 31, as of 2020. (We do not have sufficient data on people in other religious categories across the Middle East and North Africa to reliably estimate their age structure.)

Recommended Citation: Hackett, Conrad, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer, Anne Shi and Dalia Fahmy. 2025. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” Pew Research Center. doi: 10.58094/fj71-ny11.

  1. Religious identity is measured differently in Israel than elsewhere. Refer to Chapter 8 for further explanation.
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