Muslims and Islam

In 2016, seven nations – Turkey, Brunei, Ethiopia, France, Hungary, Niger and Tunisia – directly used emergency laws to restrict religion, according to Pew Research Center’s latest annual religious restrictions study. While a number of different religious groups were targeted, these laws imposed restrictions on Muslims more than any other group.

Many more U.S. Muslims identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party than the GOP (66% vs. 13%), but the share who are Republican has held steady over the last 10 years, including after the election of President Donald Trump.

Laws enacted in several European countries that restrict the religious clothing of Muslim women are largely in line with Western European attitudes on the issue.

Across Western Europe, people who say they personally know a Muslim are generally more likely than others to have positive opinions of Muslims and their religion. However, knowing something about Islam – as opposed to personally knowing a Muslim – is less associated with positive feelings of Muslims and Islam.

India is home to 1.4 billion people – almost one-sixth of the world’s population – who belong to a variety of ethnicities and religions. While 94% of the world’s Hindus live in India, there also are substantial populations of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and adherents of folk religions. Here are five facts about religion in India.

Young adults tend to be less religious than their elders by several measures; the opposite is rarely true. This pattern holds true across many countries that have different religious, economic and social profiles.

Muslim societies have gained a reputation in recent decades for failing to adequately educate women. But a new analysis of Pew Research Center data on educational attainment and religion suggests that economics, not religion, is the key factor limiting the education of Muslim women.

Neha Sahgal, a lead author of our survey of Christians in Western Europe, discusses how the survey team constructed its questions and analyzed results.

More Muslim adults say they fast during Ramadan than say they pray five times a day or attend mosque weekly.

The number of Muslim refugees admitted to the U.S. in the first half of fiscal 2018 has dropped from the previous year more than any other religious group.