Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
European campaigns to ban burqas, the Swiss vote to bar new construction of minarets and attempted terrorist acts in the United States have renewed questions and concerns about the compatibility of Islam with Western society. Swiss-born scholar and philosopher of Islam Tariq Ramadan has written and spoken on the subject, generating widespread debate and reaction. […]
The following briefing by Brian J. Grim, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, was presented to the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight on the Pew Forum’s findings on restrictions on religion around the world. Good morning. I would like to begin by […]
Largely Muslim publics express little confidence in a number of key Muslim leaders. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah receives mostly negative ratings – except in the Palestinian territories and Jordan – while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas fares even worse among the publics surveyed. Saudi King Abdullah is well-regarded among solid majorities in many of the […]
Introduction and background Wireless communication has emerged as one of the fastest diffusing mediums on the planet, fueling an emergent “mobile youth culture”[6.numoffset=”6” Castells, M., Fernandez-Ardevol, M., Qiu, J., & Sey, A. (2007). Mobile communication and society: A global perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] that speaks as much with thumbs as it does with tongues. […]
Across predominantly Muslim nations, there is little enthusiasm for the extremist Islamic organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, although there are pockets of support for both groups, especially in the Middle East.
Recent events such as the Fort Hood shootings and the arrest of five Muslim American students in Pakistan have raised questions about the threat of homegrown terrorism in the United States. However, the Pew Research Center’s comprehensive portrait of the Muslim American population suggests it is less likely to be a fertile breeding ground for […]
Recent events have raised questions about the threat of homegrown terrorism in the U.S., but survey results show that Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reject extremism.
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.