A new survey by the "Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life" shows one in every four people is Muslims worldwide. This surging Muslim populations globally call upon leaders and politicians of the freeworld to take hard decisions on Muslim immigration in order to safeguard the unconquered pockets from losing peace and liberty...


The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report, billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population (i.e. Muslim), whose size has long has been subject to guess-works, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The Pew project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some? For instance, Germany has more Muslim population than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as in Afghanistan!

‘This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report!’ said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, who reviewed an advance copy. Pew officials call the report the most thorough on the size and distribution of the adherents of the world's second largest religion behind Christianity, which has an estimated 2.1 to 2.2 billion followers worldwide.

The report also sought to pinpoint the world's Sunni-Shiite breakdown, but difficulties arose, because too few countries track sectarian affiliations, said Brian Grim, the project's senior researcher. As a result, the Shiite numbers are not as precise; the report estimates that Shiite Muslims represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Muslim Ummah, in line with or slightly lower than other studies. As much as 80 percent of the world's Shiite Muslim population lives in four countries, namely Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.

The report provides further evidence that while the heart of Islam might beat in the Middle East, its greatest numbers lie in Asia: More than 60 percent of the world's Muslims live in Asia.

About 20 percent live in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.4 percent in Europe and 0.3 percent in the Americas. While the Middle East and North Africa have fewer Muslims overall than Asia, the region easily claims the most Muslim-majority countries.

While those population trends are well-established, the large numbers of Muslims, who live as minorities in Western countries, are not as scrutinized. The report identified about 317 million Muslims or one-fifth of the world's Muslim population —living in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. About three-quarters of Muslims living as minorities are concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million)— not small numbers by any means.

In several of these countries, from India to Nigeria and China to France, divisions featuring a volatile mix of religious beliefs, class and politics have contributed to tension and bloodshed among various ethnic groups. The immense size of majority-Hindu India is underscored by the fact that, it boasts the third-largest Muslim population of any nation in the world; yet, Muslims account for just 13 percent of India's population.

‘Most people think of the Muslim world being Muslims living mostly in Muslim-majority countries,’ said Grim, adding, ‘But with India... that sort of turns that on its head a bit!’

Among the report's other highlights:

• Two-thirds of all Muslims live in 10 countries worldwide. Six are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey), three are in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco) and one is in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria).

• Indonesia, which has a tradition of a (more tolerant Islam), has the world's largest Muslim population (203 million, or 13 percent of the world's total). Religious extremists have been involved in several high-profile bombings there in recent years.

• In China, the highest concentrations of Muslims were in western provinces. The country experienced its worst outbreak of ethnic violence in decades, when rioting broke out this summer between minority Muslim Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese.

• Europe is home to about 38 million Muslims, or about five percent of its population. Germany appears to have more than 4 million Muslims—almost as many as North & South America combined. In France, where tensions have run high over an influx of Muslim immigrant laborers, the overall numbers were lower but a larger percentage of the population is still Muslims.

• Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half of them live in the United States, although they only make up 0.8 percent of the total population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslims, or about 2 percent of the Canadian population.

A future Pew Forum project, which scheduled to be released in 2010, will build on the report's data to estimate growth rates among Muslim populations and project future trends of Law & Order.

That will be an interesting study to look forward to. But we the freedom-loving people, who want to live our lives in peace and liberty, already know that citizens of the large parts of the world taken by Islam have lost their right to live in peace and liberty. If things go on as it is, one is left to wonder how much would be lose the same in parts of the world, where semblance of peace and liberty still exist, over the next decade?

Since we have these statistics, it is high time that we awaken our politicians and leaders of what is at stake, given the epidemically growing Muslim populations, who will ultimately RULE US everywhere! I know, as some shouters know on various Forums, that our inactions, our goody-goody attitude toward Muslims today, will ultimately make us all repressive.

Is it time to make hard decision? Think about it…

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