Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year from 1990 to last year to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.
Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030, compared with 1.6 billion last year, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared with 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report did not publish figures for worldwide populations of other major religions, but said the US-based Pew Forum planned similar reports on growth prospects for worldwide Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism.
Photo: AFP
“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.
“Globally, the Muslim population is forecast to grow at about twice the rate of the non-Muslim population over the next two decades — an average annual growth rate of 1.5 percent for Muslims, compared with 0.7 percent for non-Muslims,” it said.
The report, titled The Future of the Global Muslim Population, was part of a Pew Forum program analyzing religious change and its impact on societies around the world.
It said about 60 percent of the world’s Muslims would live in the Asia-Pacific region in 2030, 20 percent in the Middle East, 17.6 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.7 percent in Europe and 0.5 percent in the Americas.
Pakistan will overtake Indonesia as the world’s most numerous Muslim nation by 2030, it said, while the Muslim minority in mostly Hindu India will retain its global rank as the third-largest Muslim population.
Continued migration will swell the ranks of Europe’s Muslim minorities by one-third by 2030, to 8 percent of the region’s inhabitants from 6 percent, it said.
Muslims in France will rise to 6.9 million, or 10.3 percent of the population, from 4.7 million (7.5 percent), in Britain to 5.6 million (8.2 percent) from 2.9 million and in Germany to 5.5 million (7.1 percent) from 4.1 million (5 percent).
The Muslim share of the US population will grow from 0.8 percent last year to 1.7 percent in 2030, “making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States today,” the study said.
By 2030, Muslims will number 2.1 million, or 23.2 percent of the population, in Israel — including Jerusalem, but not the West Bank and Gaza — after 1.3 million (17.7 percent) last year.
“The slowdown in Muslim population growth is most pronounced in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East-North Africa and Europe, and less sharp in sub-Saharan Africa,” it said, while migration will accelerate it in the Americas through 2020.
While Muslim populations worldwide are still younger on average than others, the so-called “youth bulge” — the high percentage of Muslims in their teens and 20s — peaked around the year 2000 and is now declining,” the study said.
Sunni Muslims will continue to make up the overwhelming majority in Islam — about 87 to 90 percent, the report estimated — while Shi’ite numbers may decline because of relatively low birth rates in Iran, where one-third of all Shiites live.
The study saw a close link between education and birth rates in Muslim-majority countries. Women in countries with the least education for girls had about five children, while those where girls had the longest schooling averaged 2.3 children.
The study said it counted “all groups and individuals who self-identify as Muslims,” including secular or non-observant people, without measuring levels of religiosity.
It said measuring the impact of Islam on birth rates was difficult because “cultural, social, economic, political, historical and other factors may play equal or greater roles.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees