Pakistanis Say Suicide Bombings Never Justified
The view that suicide attacks against civilians are never justified is most widespread in Pakistan and Turkey, where 80% and 77%, respectively, share this opinion.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The following factors are not direct inputs into the projections, but they underlie vital assumptions about the way Muslim fertility rates are changing and Muslim populations are shifting. Education As in the rest of the world, fertility rates in countries with Muslim-majority populations are directly related to educational attainment. Women tend to delay childbearing when […]
Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims comprise the two main sects within Islam. Because data on the percentages of Sunni and Shia Muslims are rough estimates in many countries, this study presents them as ranges. 57 Sunnis will continue to make up an overwhelming majority of Muslims in 2030. The number of Sunnis is projected to […]
Fertility Fertility rates have fallen in most Muslim-majority countries in recent decades. Yet they remain, on average, higher than in the rest of the developing world and considerably higher than in more-developed countries. This is one of the main reasons that the global Muslim population is projected to rise both in absolute numbers and in […]
This study uses the standard demographic method of making population projections. Called the cohort-component method, it takes the age and sex structure of a population into account when projecting the population forward in time. This has the advantage of recognizing that an initial, baseline population can be relatively “young,” with a high proportion of people […]
Islamic radicalism in Western Europe is generally associated with networks and cells affiliated with global jihadi organizations, such as al-Qaeda, whose ideology calls for the violent pursuit of a global Islamic political order. By most accounts, support for radical extremist groups is relatively low among Muslims in Europe.[1. numoffset=”27″ See, for example, “The Great Divide: […]
A new Pew Forum report on the size, distribution and growth of the global Muslim population finds that the world’s Muslim population is expected to increase by about 35% in the next 20 years, but it is expected to grow at a slower pace in the next two decades than it did in the previous two decades.
Extremist groups Hamas and Hezbollah continue to receive mixed ratings from Muslim publics. However, opinions of al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, are consistently negative; only in Nigeria do Muslims offer views that are, on balance, positive toward al Qaeda and bin Laden.
Acknowledgments In preparing this report, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life sought the counsel and advice of scholars with expertise in Muslim groups and networks in Western Europe. Peter Mandaville, director of the Center for Global Studies and Professor of Government and Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., […]