The Handy Islam Answer Book. John Renard
global religious communities, Islam does seem to show the fastest rate of growth, with Christianity running a close second. In total numbers, Christians still appear to outnumber the approximately 1.6 billion Muslims by perhaps five hundred million. The largest concentrations of Muslims by geographical region are in South Asia, with around a third of the world’s total in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Combining all the Muslims in the Middle East and Africa adds more than another third. And the populations of Indonesia, the nation with the largest number of Muslims, combined with those of the rest of East, Central, and Southeast Asia comprise roughly the final third.
Where do Muslims live today? What are their estimated numbers?
Islam is now a truly global religious tradition. Approximately 1.6 billion Muslims live worldwide, on every continent and in most countries. In very general terms, about a third of the total live in the Middle East and North Africa. Several major ethno-linguistic groups are represented there, including Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Berbers. Many people associate Islam with Arabs even though they are now a relatively small minority of the global population. Another third live in central and southern Asia, including the southern republics of the former Soviet Union, Western China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Pakistan is the most important modern example of a nation-state established as a Muslim land. Another third are in sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, and in smaller concentrations in several dozen other countries. Indonesia boasts the single largest national population of Muslims, approaching two hundred million. At over a hundred million, India is home to the world’s largest minority Muslim population. Estimates as to American Muslims vary considerably, from three to eight million. It may also be helpful to think in terms of religio-cultural spheres, defined by key language groups, in which Islam has been a particularly important influence. The Arabicate sphere, for example, includes all those areas in which Arabic has been the dominant vehicle of Islamic expression, namely, the central Middle East, north Africa, and east Africa. The Persianate sphere consists of Iran, Afghanistan, and all of southern Asia. Within the Malayo-Polynesian sphere are Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Central Asia, including western China, and present-day Turkey and the Balkans comprise the Turkic sphere. Last but not least is the sub-Saharan sphere, in which Nigeria and other west African nations are most significant.
Followers of Islam are now present all over the world, numbering about 1.6 billion people as of 2014. This map indicates the percentage of people in each country who are Muslims.
In which countries do the largest majority Muslim populations live today?
Principal nations with majority Muslim populations include virtually all of the Middle Eastern and North African countries, plus a couple of sub-Saharan African states, such as Nigeria; Pakistan and Bangladesh; Malaysia and Indonesia; and the five Central Asian republics formerly belonging to the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). Dozens of other nations include significant minority populations, with India’s over one hundred million Muslims at the head of the list. Another important minority Muslim population that Westerners rarely hear about is that of the People’s Republic of China.
Are most Muslims Arabs?
This is a widespread misperception. Arabs, the largest remaining population of Semitic ancestry, account for only about a fifth of the global Muslim population—a total roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh alone. And within the Middle East, there are several other major ethnicities and language families. The two largest of these are Turks and Iranians—neither in any direct way related to Semitic peoples, and both using languages unrelated originally either to each other or to Arabic. In addition, significant sub-groups of Middle Eastern Muslims among Turkic peoples are, for example, Turkmen; and among Iranian peoples there are large numbers of Kurds as well as several major tribal groups living in present-day Iran.
What are some other major ethnic and cultural groups of Muslims in the World today?
Across North Africa one finds also Muslims who are ethnic Berbers and in sub-Saharan Africa dozens of tribal groups such as the Tuareg, Hausa, and Fulani. People of Indic background are by far the largest single group, if one considers a large number of ethnic subgroups together, totaling almost a third of the global Muslim population. Turkic descent accounts for the lineage of most of the citizens of Turkey as well as those of the former Soviet Central Asian republics and a region once called Eastern Turkestan that now makes up a large area of Western China—totaling about one-fifth. The people of both Iran and Afghanistan are largely of Indo-Aryan descent and are more closely related ethnically to the people of the Indian subcontinent than they are to their Arab or Turkic neighbors.
Tuareg Muslims, such as these men from Desert Timbuktu in Mali, are one of the many different ethnic and cultural groups that make up the Muslim community worldwide.
What are the most important languages in major Muslim populations?
As suggested in earlier questions about the “culture spheres,” Muslims speak and write in dozens of major language groups. Arabic remains the chief Islamic language not only because so many Muslims speak it (over three hundred million), but because it is the language of the Quran and is thus associated with Islam’s sacred origins. Multiple languages and dialects—Turkic, Indic (such as Urdu, Sindhi, and Gujarati) and Indo-European (such as Persian), Malayo-Polynesian, and African tongues—remain important spoken and literary languages and essential tools for careful study of Islam.
Do all Muslims belong to the same large religious group?
Asked whether they think of the global community of Islam as composed of various factions, most Muslims are likely to respond that all Muslims belong to the same universal umma (UM-mah, global community) or brother- and sisterhood of faith, and that any talk of sub-groups or sects is beside the point. All believe in the oneness of God, the prophetship of Muhammad, divine revelation in the Quran, the existence of angels, the ultimate accountability of all persons, and the Five Pillars—in short, all the fundamental items of belief and practice described earlier. But there are in fact various sub-communities within the larger umma, each with its unique histories and contributions to the larger history of Islam. Minority communities of Muslims have often had to contend with the same problems that have beset minorities always and everywhere, regardless of the composition of the majority in which they find themselves.
RADICAL POLITICALLY ACTIVIST AND RELIGIOUSLY IDEALIST FACTIONS
What are politically radical activists and religiously idealist factions?
In this context, “radical” refers to highly mission-oriented groups whose members subscribe to a hard-core exclusivist ideology and tend to be willing to use harsh or even “extremist” tactics to achieve their goals. The term “politically activist” describes an ideology focused on establishing and enforcing a comprehensive system of governance and social control. And, as the chapter on “Essential Beliefs” below will explain further, the phrase “religiously idealist” refers to factions whose interpretation of Muslim history calls for the systematic restoration of what they believe to be Prophetic “ideal”—to recreate as nearly as possible the overall environment they claim characterized the lifetime of Muhammad during the Medinan years (622–632).
What sort of Muslims are the “Taliban”?
A group originally of Pakistani and Afghan nationalities, mostly of Pashtun ethnicity, emerged during the 1980s during Afghanistan’s struggle to fend off the Soviet Union’s military invasion. Among the mujahideen (freedom fighters) engaged prominently in the struggle were a faction who called themselves taliban (a Persian plural meaning “seekers, students”). Most members of the faction consider a reclusive figure named Mullah Umar their foundational figure, but his role in the group’s ongoing activities remains little understood. Taliban social policies are notoriously oppressive toward women especially, as manifest in their refusal