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January 2010 – Since the events of 9/11 there are probably very few Americans who have not had a conversation about the religion of Islam and its adherents, called Muslims.

But Islam is still something of a mystery to many in the U.S. How many Muslims are there in America and the world? Where do they live? What do they believe?

Islam is certainly not going away and many Americans – especially Christians – need a better grasp of the world’s second largest religion.

How many Muslims are there?
A fascinating new report gives a detailed look at the size and distribution of Muslims worldwide, dispelling some myths and presenting challenges to a church that is still commissioned to take the Gospel to every corner of the globe.

The document, titled Mapping the Global Muslim Population, was released in October 2009 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The comprehensive demographic study of data from 232 countries and territories was combined with discussions with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists from around the world. Pew said it was “the largest project of its kind to date.”

The study put the total number of Muslims in the world at 1.57 billion. That’s about 23% of the total 6.8 billion people on earth.

The Pew Forum intends to follow up the initial findings with an attempt to approximate growth rates among the world’s Muslim populations in order to project the religion’s influence into the future.

In 2010 Pew also intends to initiate a similar study of global Christianity. Best estimates of the world’s Christian population puts it at approximately 2.1 billion – nearly 30% of the total.

Where do Muslims live?
Mapping the global Muslim population found a number of facts about Islam that may seem counterintuitive. For example, the majority of Muslims do not live in the Middle East, even though much of the world’s attention is regularly focused there due to oil prices, the Iraq War and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“While Muslims are found on all six inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa,” according to the study.

On the other hand, what the Middle East-North Africa region does have is the highest percentage of countries with a Muslim majority. Pew found that more than half of the 20 countries in that part of the world have populations that are about 95% Muslim.

In fact, the world’s Muslims are actually concentrated in a handful of nations. Two out of every three Muslims in the world live in one of the following 10 countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Nigeria.

Many Muslims – more than 300 million, in fact, or one-fifth of the world’s total Muslim population – live in countries where Islam is a minority religion. “These minority Muslim populations are often quite large,” said the Pew study. “India, for example, has the third-largest population of Muslims worldwide. China has more Muslims than Syria, while Russia is home to more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined.”

For those Americans who are worried about Muslims taking over the United States, that hardly seems likely – at least in the foreseeable future. There are about 2.5 million Muslims living in the U.S., a number representing only 0.8% of the total population. As a percentage of the world total, only 0.2% of the earth’s Muslims live in this country.

What Muslims believe
What does the religion of Islam teach? Briefly stated, here are some of the main beliefs held by the world’s Muslims:

▶ There is no God but Allah.
According to the Biography of Prophet Muhammad, Allah is the proper name in Arabic for The One and Only God.” The name “is used by the Arab Christians and Jews for God (Elohim in Hebrew; ‘Allaha’ in Aramaic…).”

▶ The prophet of Allah is Muhammad.
Muhammad was born in A.D. 570 in the city of Mecca, a city in modern-day Saudi Arabia that was then an important trading hub for the various caravan routes that intersected there. When he was 40 years old, Muhammad was meditating on a mountain during the month of Ramadan when he received what he claimed was the first of a series of revelations from the angel Gabriel.

Over a period of approximately 23 years, Gabriel allegedly continued to visit Muhammad. The statements of Allah passed along by the angel were recorded in the Koran. This is the Islamic holy book, considered to be the final revelation of God to mankind. According to Muslims, the Koran does not contain any statements made by Muhammad himself.

However, Muhammad’s own statements and deeds were recorded as collections called Hadith, although the two main sects of Islam – the Sunnis and Shias – each have a different Hadith.

Citing various prophecies – including Old Testament Scriptures that Muslims apply to Muhammad – he was seen as the expected prophet who would restore the proper worship of God after it had been corrupted by both Jews and Christians.

▶ The five pillars of Islam
There are five duties required of all Muslims, beginning with the profession of faith: “There is no God but Allah; and Muhammad is his prophet.”

According to Solomon Nigosian, a professor of Near Eastern religions at the University of Toronto and author of Islam: The Way Of Submission, confessing this creed is enough to make one a convert to Islam.

The four remaining duties are: compulsory prayer during the five established times a day while facing toward Mecca; giving alms to the poor; fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan; and a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime if a Muslim man or woman is physically and financially able to do so.

Closest of competitors
Along with Judaism and Christianity, Islam is one of the world’s three monotheistic religions. In fact, Islam is in some ways closely related to the other two faiths. All three, for example, point to Abraham as a father of their religion.

Islam also declares that all true prophets – most of whom are easily recognizable Old Testament figures – should be heard by Muslims. Islam considers Jesus Christ to be a prophet, but denies that He is divine, died on the cross for sins or rose from the dead.

But since the word “Islam” itself means peace by submission to the will of God as revealed in the Koran, Islam declares itself to be the one true faith – making it as exclusive a religion as Christianity.

It is these two factors – similarity and exclusive claims – that have made these two religions competitors, according to Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the co-author of Islam: The Religion and the People.

“What brought Islam and Christendom into conflict was not so much their differences as their resemblances. There are many religions in the world, but almost all of them are regional, local, ethnic, or whatever you choose to call it,” Lewis told Foreign Policy magazine. “Christianity and Islam are the only religions that claim universal truth. Christians and Muslims are the only people who claim they are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves … but to bring to the rest of mankind, removing whatever obstacles there may be in the way. So, we have two religions with a similar self-perception, a similar historical background, living side by side, and conflict becomes inevitable.”

That conflict – to be dealt with in a subsequent feature – has become only too obvious since the terrorist attacks both before and after 9/11, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere. Christians must take Islam seriously, at least in its radicalized form as expressed by terrorism, as a competing ideology that seeks to supplant the core values of Western Civilization.

But it would seem to be an even greater obligation for Christians to understand the nature of Islam as the religion that is Christianity’s closest competitor for the souls of men and women.   

Learn more about Muslims and Islam
▶ “Muslims in America: Mission field or mine field?” AFA Journal, July 2004 
▶ Christian Missions to Islam Web site: www.arabicbible.com/christian/missions.htm
▶ Islam and Christianity: A Revealing Contrast by James F. Gauss, Bridge-Logos Books (2009)
▶ The Dark Side of Islam by R. C. Sproul and Abdul Saleeb, Crossway (2003)