12. Religion in the Middle East and North Africa
Every religious group grew in count in the Middle East and North Africa – a Muslim-majority region – between 2010 and 2020.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Every religious group grew in count in the Middle East and North Africa – a Muslim-majority region – between 2010 and 2020.
Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing and second-largest religious group. In the Middle East-North Africa region, they make up 94% of the population.
By some measures, the world’s most religious countries are mostly in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Muslims account for 29% of global migrants and most commonly live in the Middle-East North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions.
There are 135 cardinals who are eligible to vote in the coming papal election, and a plurality (40%) are from Europe. That’s down from 51% in 2013.
Jewish people make up 0.2% of the world population. Jews rose in number by 6% from 2010 to 2020, mostly due to growth in Israel.
Hindus are the fourth-largest religious category in the world. Nearly all Hindus live in the Asia-Pacific region, with about 95% living in India alone.
Hindus make up just 5% of all migrants. They most commonly live in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America.
From 2010 to 2020, the number of Muslims increased by 347 million people to 2.0 billion people.
For each destination country, this Appendix tabulates the methods of deriving the religious composition of migrant stocks from various origin countries. We only estimate the religious composition of origin-destination country pairs that appear in the United Nations’ migrant stock database. For example, for Afghanistan, the UN only provides estimates of the number of migrants from […]
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