About Islam:
- Islam is the second most popular religion in the world. There were
about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world in 2010, according to Pew Research.
Muslims constituted about 23% of all people on Earth. The religion is
currently in a period of rapid
growth, and is expected to reach 2.8 billion by 2050, when the
number of Muslims will probably approximately equal the number of
Christians in the world. 1
- Estimates of the number of Muslim adults in the U.S. have ranged
from 1 to 7 million. The former estimate is based on public opinion
polls and assume that almost all adults who consider themselves Muslims
are willing to respond openly to public opinion pollsters. Because of
the widespread islamophobia in the country, this value is probably an
underestimate. The latter estimate comes from Muslim groups in the U.S.
who assume that all immigrants to the U.S. from Muslim countries were
Muslims and have remained so to the present time. It is probably higher
than the actual value2
A Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report in 2015
concluded that the U.S. population of Muslim adults is 2.6 million --
0.6% of the total population. This places Islam as the third most
popular organized religion in the U.S. after Christianity (71%) and
Judaism (0.9%). 3
- In any discussion of Islam, the topic of terrorism, murder, mass
murder and genocide by a radical, violent wing of Islam is not far from
the surface. One important item to remember is that terrorists, and
their supporters, represent a small percentage of followers within the
religion who follow a type of Islam that has little regard for human
life. It is also important to recall that most vistims of these
terrorists are fellow Muslims.
