World’s Muslim population more widespread than you might think
While many, especially in the U.S., may associate Islam with the Middle East or North Africa, nearly two-thirds of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region.
Social hostilities toward religion declined in 2013, while government restrictions on religious beliefs and practices remained level. Harassment of Jews, however, reached a seven-year high.
Pew Research’s fourth major report on global restrictions on religion finds that the share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religion rose from 37% in 2010 to 40% in 2011. The Middle East and North Africa continued to have the highest levels of restrictions in the year when much of the Arab Spring uprisings occurred, with social hostilities involving religion increasing markedly and government restrictions remaining high.
Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center. But many supporters of sharia say it should apply only to their country’s Muslim population. Moreover, Muslims are not equally comfortable with all aspects of sharia: […]
.footnotes p{ color: #58585B;font-size: 1.2em !important; } .sortable th a{ color:#000000; } .sortable th .desc, .sortable th .asc{ color:#456A83; } td{ padding: 8px 5px !important; } View as: Numbers | Percentages Country Est. 2010 Christian Population Est. 2010 Muslim Population Est. 2010 Unaffiliated Population Est. 2010 Hindu Population Est. 2010 Buddhist Population Est. 2010 Folk […]
The world’s Muslims are united in their belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad and are bound together by such religious practices as fasting during Ramadan and almsgiving to assist the needy. But they have widely differing views about other aspects of their faith, including how important religion is to their lives, who counts as a Muslim and what practices are acceptable in Islam.
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.
by Brian J. Grim, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and Richard Wike, Pew Global Attitudes Project Earlier this month, Turkey threatened to curtail U.S. military access to Turkish bases and recalled its ambassador from Washington for consultations. These actions came in response to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee’s approval of a resolution […]
Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2007 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Ray Takeyh, a leading expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, shed light on the complex and diffuse […]
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