Where is islam located today

First is the age of the estimate, which is relevant because the Muslim population in each country tends to grow, raising the nationwide percentage of Muslims over time.

The second cause is that some sources include various regions such as Western Sahara or Palestine , which are sometimes considered countries and sometimes considered territories, and other sources do not.

The Pew Research Center acknowledged a total of 50 Muslim-majority nations including territories West Bank , Gaza Strip, Mayotte , and Western Sahara in the world in , but added Nigeria to its estimate to reach Another country that is currently left off of most lists of Muslim-majority countries, but which may be added someday soon is Eritrea , whose Muslim population has been estimated to be as low as If updated numbers become available, Eritrea may well become the newest Muslim-majority country.

Share this link:. Why Muslims are the world's fastest-growing religious group. Many religions heavily concentrated in one or two countries. The countries with the 10 largest Christian populations and the 10 largest Muslim populations. Topics Islam Muslims Around the World. Are you a Faith and Flag Conservative? Progressive Left?

Or somewhere in between? Take our quiz to find out. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. Map: Distribution of Muslim Population by Country and Territory Only countries with more than 1 million Muslims are shown Muslim population, the percentage of its population that is Muslim and the percentage of the world Muslim population it represents.

Download the map Asia Predominates Two-thirds of all Muslims worldwide live in the 10 countries shown below. As a result, the percentage of the population that is Muslim in these two countries is rounded to the nearest integer.

As a result, the percentage of the population that is Muslim in Germany is rounded to the nearest integer. The figures for Shias are generally given in a range because of the limitations of the secondary-source data see Methodology for Sunni-Shia Estimates. Figures may not sum to totals due to rounding. Related Publications Dec 18, Interactives Mar 8, Publications Mar 8, Interactives Dec 19, A Solid Liberal? Unemployment of masses of people; rapid urbanisation; unbalanced development - all need to be addressed quickly by the ummah, if the ummah is to become the social force of international Islam.

The wide imbalances in the distribution of incomes and wealth between Muslim societies are obvious, but since effective redistribution is not happening within most Muslim societies it is unlikely to occur to any major degree between different Muslim societies. Development investment in Muslim countries is slow simply because investors are put off by the more extremist agitations and the perceptions in the West about Islamic legal proscriptions of such financial mechanisms as interest.

Muslim investors appear quite happy to send their money into the non-Muslim economies, where greater profits are available and the political and social circumstances are much more settled. In other cases, where people are trying to help their communities they often encounter problems from unlikely sources. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been lending small sums of money, mostly to rural women so that they can engage in small enterprises, but also to collective groups.

The sums are small and the interest is fixed, with the principal being repaid first and the interest calculated on the diminishing principal.

Twenty per cent interest per year still seems high, but it is tiny when compared with the twenty per cent per month or ten per cent per day demanded by the traditional money-lenders, or the compound interest at Bangladesh's commercial banks. The Grameen Bank lends money to people who would not be eligible in the normal commercial sense.

People are helped to determine the best way to satisfy their needs and are helped by the bank's officers in the villages. The Grameen Bank goes out to its clients and it permits the good sense and honesty of its clients to prevail: it has a recovery rate of some ninety eight per cent. The bank faces conflict from the traditional money-lenders, the commercial banks which claim that the scheme is too small to create the economic growth necessary in Bangladesh, and from the Muslims who see the scheme emancipating women in the villages.

The bank fulfils the ideals of Islamic thinking, but is attacked by established interest groups defending their interpretation of Islamic practice. Economic frustration and unequal opportunities are fertile breeding grounds for dissent and protest. Equally important is the failure of most Muslim governments to confront the demands of general education.

It is the necessary context for every tolerably well-informed life-journey undertaken in the contemporary world. Dr Mahathir bin Mohamed has made the point that there can be no separation between secular and religious knowledge because all knowledge, all life, is encompassed by Islam. It is interesting that so prominent and successful a Muslim leader as Dr Mahathir had to tread a fine line: advocating on the one hand an independent and progressive Muslim attitude to acquiring the widest possible knowledge, while placating the traditional sensibilities by insisting on the moral rectitude of learning as the only way to protect the faith.

There are Muslim intellectuals working to understand what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world, but they do not receive the prominence given to the extremists in Western reports. Western media are more interested in the violent and emotional than they are in quiet, but deeply significant, debates about the eternal values that remain, despite the anarchic individualism of Western communities, the essence of being human.

Not only are Muslim intellectuals under pressure from the conservative elements of their own societies, they are not receiving the recognition and support they deserve from the West. Yet it is at this level of ideas and reassessments that Muslim leaders will have to convert the de facto modernisation of their societies into general acceptance. The renaissance of ijtihad will be needed to reinterpret the principles of Islam, to retain the critical moral core while jettisoning the dubious accretions of traditional and worldly Muslim authorities.

The whole panoply of modern knowledge and technology is acceptable, but its Western manifestations are to be avoided if all they achieve is the perpetuation of the Muslim world's dependence on Western developments. A fundamental problem here is that which bedevils Western societies: can the use of and reliance upon new technologies alter perceptions, change desires, force social changes?

Do the people who create and maintain the new technologies become the new high-priests. All knowledge and technology entail more than the physical and objective characteristics; they also contain the moral questions about how the new technologies should be used, what controls should be placed on them and who should be responsible for the implementation of the regulations.

These are moral questions the simply secular authorities cannot answer, if only because utilitarian arguments lead us only to numerical quantities not qualitative priorities. There is a very real danger involved if Muslims are not critical enough of Western world perceptions and if they take things for granted.

There needs to be an increase in criticism in the light of Islam criteria. Without a heightened critical faculty Muslims are in danger of considering. He who understands the structure of Islam in its totality knows that it can never allow itself to become reduced to a mere modifier or contingency vis-a-vis a system of thought which remains independent of it or even hostile to it.

The main danger arises if Muslims accept the more extreme view of the difference of Islam and the insistence on establishing 'the third way'. If everything Western is to be discarded, then the creative and productive dynamism inherent in Islamic traditions will be suppressed yet again.