Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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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 […]
The Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by nearly 60% in the next 20 years, from 242.5 million in 2010 to 385.9 million in 2030. Because the region’s non- Muslim population also is growing at a rapid pace, Muslims are expected to make up only a slightly larger share of the region’s […]
George Mason University Professor Peter Mandaville, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation, and Maha Azzam of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House discussed key findings of a Pew Forum study containing profiles of some of the oldest, largest and most influential Muslim groups – from the Muslim Brotherhood to mystical Sufi orders and networks of religious scholars.
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.