Global IssuesGlobal Muslim Population Growing but Slowing
The world's Muslim population will increase by 35 percent in the next 20 years, according to new estimates by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life.
'The Future of the Global Muslim Population', released Thursday, projects that it will grow to 2.2 billion people and comprise 26.4 percent of the 8.3 billion projected as the world's population in 2030.
In 2010, the global Muslim population, estimated at 1.6 billion, made up 23.4 percent of the total global population, estimated at 6.9 billion.
Alan Cooperman, associate director of Research at the Pew Forum, described Muslim population growth as 'growing but slowing'.
'It's not runaway growth,' he said at a press conference. 'On the contrary, it is likely to grow at a slower pace in the next 20 years than it did in the previous 20.'
The report states that from 2010 to 2030, the 1.5 percent growth rate of the Muslim population is projected to be just over twice the non-Muslim growth rate of .7 percent.
These statistics are unsurprising because according to data from the report, the growth pace of the Muslim population has been double that of non-Muslims for the past 20 years.
More significant is that Muslim population growth has decelerated, from an annual average rate of 2.2 percent between 1990 and 2010, to the 1.5 percent projected for 2010 until 2030.
Declining fertility rates, due in part to increasing access to education for women and higher standards of living, account for the lower growth rates, although fertility rates in majority Muslim countries remain, on average, higher than in majority non-Muslim countries.
Despite being the second largest religion in the world, 'There has been very little solid population data on global Islam,' Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, said in a press conference. 'This has helped fuel speculation and controversy.'
'It is our hope that our research will contribute more scientific and credible estimates of the number of Muslims living in each country, in each region, and around the world,' he added.
Some of the most noticeable changes will take place in Northern and Western Europe, where in 10 countries, the Muslim population percentage is expected to reach double digits by 2010, Brian Grim, senior researcher at the Pew Forum, told reporters.
This increase is driven mainly by high immigration. Last year, Muslims comprised two-thirds of the immigrants in France, and in Britain, more than a quarter of immigrants were Muslim.
Still, in Europe as a whole, although the Muslim population is expected to increase by about 14 million by 2030, its percentage as part of the global Muslim population is not projected to change. Rather, in 20 years, Europe will still be home to 2.7 percent of the world's Muslims.
By 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa's Muslim population is expected to increase by about 143 million, so that 17.6 percent of the global Muslim population will live there, up from 15 percent today.
Overall, the statistics did not project monumental changes. Similar to today, in 2030 about 60 percent of the world's Muslims will still live in the Asia-Pacific region, and about 20 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.
Changing demographics within Muslim populations, however, hold implications for those populations and the countries in which they live.
For example, in the United States, the Muslim population is projected to increase from 2.6 million in 2010 to about 6.2 million in 2030, at which point they would equal only about 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population.
Such change is certain to have political and social implications as immigrants settle and begin to raise families.
'Twenty years from now, a larger portion of the Muslim community will be native-born Americans, as opposed to now, when a large majority of Muslims in the U.S. were born in another country,' Grim told IPS in an interview, admitting that these shifts could 'change the dynamics' of the country.
Grim explained, 'Migration makes a difference when you have a small population and it's growing through immigration. That's the case in the U.S. and Canada and some countries in Europe.' When the initial population is small, immigration becomes 'one of the main drivers of growth', he told IPS.
Cooperman called the report's projections 'state of the art', but he acknowledged that 'lots of things - political decisions, economic cycles, medical and scientific advances, wars, famines, and so on - can change demographic trends in unforeseen ways.'
How the political unrest that has lately swept across the Middle East and North Africa affects immigration and other statistics will remain to be seen.
The report defined as Muslim any individual who self- identified him or herself as a Muslim. Numbers and statistics were drawn from more than 1,500 sources, including census reports, demographic studies and population surveys.
The report is part of a larger effort by the Pew Forum to collect data and statistics on various population groups, including Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and the non-affiliated. Later this year, the Pew Forum plans to release a similar report on the world's Christian population.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service