Muslims by the numbers: 7 facts from the 2020 count

Pew counts 2.0 billion Muslims in 2020, a rise of 21% in ten years. The rest of the world grew by about 10% over the same period.^[1] Muslims now make up 25.6% of humanity, up from about 23.8% in 2010, and the increase of 347 million is larger than the increase of all other religious groups put together.^[2]

Pew calls Muslims the fastest-growing religious group of the decade. A count of that size has margins of error, and Pew draws it from census and survey data that differ in quality from country to country.

The comparison with other groups shows what the figure means. Christians remain the largest group, at 2.3 billion, after a rise of 122 million, but their share of the world fell by 1.8 points to 28.8%. Muslims rose by the same 1.8 points, to 25.6%. The religiously unaffiliated rose by 270 million to 1.9 billion, Hindus by 126 million to 1.2 billion, and Jews by nearly a million to 14.8 million, while Buddhists fell by 19 million to 324 million.^[2] The number of countries and territories with a Muslim majority stayed at 53.^[2]

The gap between Christians and Muslims is now about 300 million people, and it narrowed by more than 200 million in ten years. That narrowing is the real news in the report, and it comes almost entirely from where the two groups live and how old they are.

Pew attributes the increase mainly to natural increase, because Muslims have a young age structure and higher fertility than most groups.^[2] Switching religion has a small effect on the totals. Muslims are one of the few groups in which more people join than leave, but the numbers who switch in either direction are low.^[2]

The report therefore gives no support to the claim that Muslim growth comes from mass conversion, and none to the claim that Muslims are leaving in large numbers.

The age figures explain the rest. A third of all Muslims in the world, 33%, are under fifteen.^[2] A young population grows even when each family is small, because so many of its members are entering the years when people marry and have children. The median age of Christians is 30.8 years, close to the world median of 30.6, and the unaffiliated are older still and have lower fertility than Christians, Muslims or Hindus.^[2]

The switching figures come from surveys of adults aged 18 to 54 in 117 countries and territories. For Christians, 3.1 people left for every 1.0 who joined. For every adult who joined a religion after being raised without one, 3.2 left religion altogether after being raised in one.^[2] Pew describes switching into or out of Islam as relatively uncommon, with more joiners than leavers.^[2] Surveys of this kind depend on people being free to answer honestly, which is a limit in countries where leaving a religion carries a legal or social cost, and the same limit applies to joining.

Asia and the Pacific hold 59% of the world’s Muslims. The Middle East and North Africa hold about one in five.^[1] A third of all Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan or India, and Indonesia alone has about 240 million, roughly 12% of the total.^[1]

Western debates often use “Muslim” and “Arab” as if they were the same word. The numbers show a religion whose centre of population sits in South and Southeast Asia.

The Asia-Pacific region also showed the largest rise in Muslim share of any region, up 1.4 points to 26% of its people, even as its share of the world’s Muslims fell by two points to 59%, because Muslim numbers grew faster still in Africa.^[1] Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, is a democracy with a long tradition of Islamic organisations independent of the state. The article on Indonesia sets out its story.

The country-level changes show how much depends on migration. Kazakhstan saw the largest rise in Muslim share, 8 points, as the Christian share fell from 27% to 19%, partly through emigration. Oman saw the largest fall عليه السلام, also 8 points, because its foreign-born share rose from 30% to about half of all residents and many of the migrants were not Muslim. In Lebanon the Muslim share rose by 5 points with the arrival of refugees from the Syrian war.^[1]

India has 213 million Muslims, which is 15% of its population.^[1] The ten countries with the most Muslims together hold 1.3 billion people, or 65% of the world total, and nine of the ten are Muslim-majority states.^[1]

India is the exception on that list. One of the largest Muslim communities on earth lives as a minority under a non-Muslim majority.

The number puts India among the three largest Muslim populations in the world, alongside Indonesia and Pakistan, and well ahead of every Arab country. Indian Muslims have produced some of the great works of Islamic learning, architecture and poetry, from the Mughal courts to the seminary at Deoband, and their position as a minority in a democracy is one of the defining questions of Muslim life today.

A minority of 15% sounds small until it is set against the totals: 213 million is about twice the population of Egypt, the largest Arab country. Any account of Islam that treats it as the faith of Muslim-majority states leaves out one of its largest communities.

Sub-Saharan Africa has 369 million Muslims, up 34% since 2010. They are 33% of the region’s population and hold 18% of the world’s Muslims, two points more than in 2010.^[1]

Pew also records cases where the Muslim share fell. In Tanzania, Muslim women averaged 4.6 children against 5.5 for all women, and the Muslim share fell by 6 points.^[1] Higher fertility is therefore not a rule for every Muslim population.

Pew flags one of its own figures in the region as uncertain. Its estimate for Benin shows the Muslim share up by 8 points, but the 2012 survey on which it partly rests gave a Muslim share well below the 2013 census, and the country has had no census since.^[1] A rise of that size may partly reflect a change in the sources.

The broader picture is clear. Africa south of the Sahara holds nearly one Muslim in five, a share that has risen by two points in a decade, and its young population makes it the region where the Muslim population is likely to grow fastest in the years ahead. The scholarly traditions of West Africa, from Timbuktu to Sokoto, are part of the inheritance of that population.

Muslims make up 6% of Europe’s population, up 0.7 points from 2010.^[1] North America has 5.9 million Muslims, which is a rise of 52% and the fastest growth of any region, from a small base.^[1]

In Sweden the Muslim share rose by 4 points, in Austria by 3 and in Germany by 1. Pew links the modest increases in those three countries partly to Syrian refugees.^[1] Pew adds that Muslim fertility in several European countries is higher than average.

Six per cent is the figure to set against the claims of imminent takeover. It means that about one European in seventeen is Muslim, and the rise over the decade was less than a percentage point across the continent as a whole. The highest shares are in a handful of countries with large migrant populations, and the rise in each of them is measured in single points.

The North American growth rate of 52% is the highest of any region, but from a small base: 5.9 million people in a continent of more than 370 million. Latin America and the Caribbean were the only region where the Muslim share did not rise at all; there the Muslim population grew by 6% while the rest grew by 10%.^[1] Projections from these figures depend on assumptions about migration, fertility and switching that can change within a generation, which is why demographers present them as scenarios.

Christians fell below half of the population in the United Kingdom (49%) and France (46%) during the decade, and the Netherlands now has a religiously unaffiliated majority (54%).^[2] In the United States the Christian share dropped from 78.3% to 64.0%, while the unaffiliated share rose from 16.5% to 29.7%.^[2]

A Muslim share of 6% in Europe sits against a falling Christian share and a growing unaffiliated one. The largest shift in Western religion over the decade was the rise of the unaffiliated.

Pew also notes a measurement problem that shapes the global figures for the unaffiliated. China, with a very large population, measures religious identity differently from most countries, which lowers its religious share and raises the world estimate of the unaffiliated.^[2] The direction of change in the West does not depend on China, and the Western figures above come from national data.

For Muslims in the West, the context matters as much as the count. A Muslim family in Amsterdam or London now lives in a society where most of its neighbours are either unaffiliated or Christian by name only, and where religious practice of any kind is a minority habit. That is a different setting from the one the takeover claims describe, and it shapes how Muslim communities explain their faith to the people around them.