Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Overview The public remains divided over whether Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. Currently, 40% say the Islamic religion is more likely than others to encourage violence while 42% say it is not. These opinions have changed little in recent years. But in March 2002, just 25% saw […]
Events and controversies related to Islam dominated U.S. press coverage of religion in 2010, bumping the Catholic Church from the top spot, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
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 […]
A little more than a year ago, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life published Mapping the Global Muslim Population, which estimated that there were 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages around the world in 2009. Now, with this report on The Future of the Global Muslim Population, we are taking the […]
Explore the Future of the Global Muslim Population report and related resources.
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 […]
Project Advisers Charles F. Westoff, Princeton University John Casterline, Ohio State University Tukufu Zuberi, University of Pennsylvania Peter Xenos, University of Hawaii Amaney Jamal, Princeton University Carl Haub, Population Reference Bureau Mohamed Ayad, ICF Macro Consultants Below is the list of demographers and social scientists with whom the Pew Forum consulted to arrive at the […]
The number of Muslims in the Asia-Pacific region – which, for purposes of this report, includes not only East Asian countries such as China but also countries as far west as Turkey – is projected to increase from about 1 billion in 2010 to about 1.3 billion in 2030. Nearly three in- ten people living […]