http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/US.php?id=2539The global Muslim population could increase by about 35 percent in the next 20 years, about twice the growth rate of the non-Muslim population, a new study says.
The Muslim population could grow from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.2 billion by 2030, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s report “The Future of the Global Muslim Population.” This represents an increase from 23.4 percent of the estimated world population to 26.4 percent.
A majority of the world’s Muslims will continue to live in the Asia-Pacific region. Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the country with the single largest Muslim population, and in 20 years more Muslims are likely to live in Nigeria than in Egypt.
Sunni Muslims will continue to comprise an overwhelming majority of Muslims in 2030, about 87-90 percent. The Shia population could decline slightly because of relatively low fertility rates in Iran.
Due to immigration and higher fertility rates, in the United States the Muslim population is projected to double from 2.6 million today to 6.2 million in 2030.
Pew’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found that at present about 0.6 percent of the U.S. population is Muslim, while 51.3 percent are Protestant Christians, 23.9 percent are Catholics, and 1.7 percent are Jewish.
The number of Muslims in Canada could nearly triple in the next twenty years to nearly 2.7 million, while Argentina’s Muslim population could become the third-largest in the Americas.
Europe’s total Muslim population could grow from six percent to eight percent by 2030, with the greatest increases in Western and Northern Europe. In the Middle East, only Lebanon and Israel will have a population that is not more than 75 percent Muslim, while Lebanon will be more than half-Muslim if projections hold. In Nigeria, where Christian and Muslim numbers are roughly equal, Muslims could become the majority population.
At the same time, the population growth rates of both Muslims and non-Muslims are projected to slow. While the global Muslim population increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent from 1990 to 2010, its growth rate from 2010 to 2030 is expected to be 1.5 percent.
Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, told the New York Times the report challenged claims that Muslims’ demographic growth will lead to their coming dominance in either Europe or the United States.
“There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close."
The Muslim population also varies by age groups, with a particularly large cohort now in young adulthood.
Peter Mandaville, director of the Center for Global Studies at George Mason University, told the Times that the “youth bulge” is at “crisis level.”
“As events in Tunisia and Egypt show, the number of under-30s who are un- or underemployed is still enormous, and the possibility of that youth bulge producing political and economic tension is still very present.”
The limited available information about religious conversion into and out of Islam indicates that there is no major net gain or loss through a change in religion. A 2009 survey of 19 nations in sub-Saharan Africa found neither Christianity nor Islam is growing significantly at the other’s expense.
The Pew Forum noted that the use of birth control is “significantly lower” in Muslim-majority countries, which “directly contributes” to higher fertility rates. In non-Muslim majority, more developed countries 68.5 percent of married women aged 15-49 use methods of birth control. In Muslim-majority countries, only 47.8 percent do.
Other factors related to population growth include education, urbanization and economic well-being.
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