Islam Today

How many Muslims are there?

About 2.0 billion people identified as Muslim in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, or 25.6 percent of the world's population.¹² Their number grew by 347 million from 2010, more than all other religions combined. The Muslim share of the world rose by 1.8 percentage points, and Pew calls Muslims the fastest-growing religious group of the decade.¹

Pew counts people who identify as Muslim, mostly from censuses and surveys that ask people their religion.³ Pew's global estimate of the branches comes from a 2009 report: 87 to 90 percent Sunni and 10 to 13 percent Shia. Pew calls these broad ranges approximate, because many countries do not collect data on branch.⁴

Why is the Muslim share growing?

The number of Muslims grew 21 percent from 2010 to 2020, twice as fast as the rest of the world's population.² Pew attributes the increase largely to a young age structure and a high fertility rate. In 2020, 33 percent of Muslims were under 15, the highest share of any religious group.¹

Switching religions played a small part. More people joined the Muslim category than left it, Pew finds, but switching into or out of it is relatively uncommon.¹ Muslim growth largely reflected overall population growth in the countries where Muslims are concentrated, so few countries had large changes in their Muslim share.¹

Where do Muslims live?

About 59 percent of the world's Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region, down 2 points from 2010, and 18 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, up 2 points.² Muslims are a large majority in the Middle East and North Africa and a minority in every other region. About eight in ten Muslims live in a country where Muslims are the majority.²¹

The fastest growth came in North America, where Muslims numbered 5.9 million in 2020, up 52 percent, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where they grew 34 percent to 369 million.² In the tables below, rows marked "calculated" multiply a population by its Muslim share from Pew's table; the other figures are Pew's.⁵²

Region	Muslims, 2020	Share of the region
Asia and the Pacific	about 1.19 billion (calculated)	26.1 percent
Middle East and North Africa	about 414 million (calculated)	94.2 percent
Sub-Saharan Africa	369 million	32.8 percent
Europe	about 45 million (calculated)	6.0 percent
North America	5.9 million	1.6 percent

A third of the world's Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, or India. India is the one country among the ten largest where Muslims are not a majority: its 213 million Muslims make up 15 percent of the population.²

Country	Muslims, 2020	Share of the country
Indonesia	roughly 240 million	87.0 percent
Pakistan	about 227 million (calculated)	96.5 percent
India	213 million	15.2 percent
Bangladesh	about 151 million (calculated)	91.1 percent
Nigeria	about 120 million (calculated)	56.1 percent
Egypt	about 104 million (calculated)	95.2 percent
United States	about 4.1 million (calculated)	1.2 percent

What do the projections say?

These projections come from a Pew Research Center report of April 2015, which extended the trends of the time from 2010 to 2050.⁶ It projected that Muslims would grow from about 1.6 billion in 2010 to nearly 2.8 billion in 2050, rising from 23 to 30 percent of the world.⁷

Christians would number 2.9 billion, and if the trends continued, the two shares would be equal, at roughly 32 percent each, around 2070. India would have more Muslims than any other country by 2050.⁶ Pew's revised estimate puts Muslims at 24 percent of the world in 2010, a change of less than 1 point from the figure these projections start from.⁸

How are Muslims organized?

Each branch of Islam organizes religious authority in its own way.⁴⁹¹⁰

• Sunni schools of law and centers of learning. Pew counts followers of the Hanafi, Shafii, Maliki, and Hanbali schools of law, and of the Wahhabi or Salafi movement, among Sunnis.⁴ Al-Azhar in Cairo, a mosque founded in 970 CE that grew into a university, is the leading center of Sunni learning, the scholar Ismail Poonawala writes. Its head is the shaykh al-Azhar.¹¹
• Twelver jurists. Twelvers look to a marja-i taqlid, or "source of imitation," a leading jurist whose rulings they follow. Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes that the last jurist accepted by all Twelvers as their supreme head died in 1962. Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran are major centers of learning.⁹
• The Ismaili imam. The Shia Ismaili Muslims who follow the Aga Khan are led by a living, hereditary imam. On February 5, 2025, Rahim Aga Khan V was named the 50th imam, after the death of his father, Karim Aga Khan IV.¹² The Imamat puts the Ismailis at about 12 to 15 million; its 2025 statement says they live in over 35 countries, and the Aga Khan Development Network's page on the Imamat says over 70.¹³¹⁴
• Ibadi imams and scholars. Ibadis live mainly in Oman, Zanzibar, and parts of North Africa. Their tradition holds that any upright believer may be elected imam, whatever his tribe or race. Since Qaboos bin Said became sultan of Oman in 1970, there has been a sustained program of publishing major Ibadi works.¹⁰
• Sufi orders, found among both Sunnis and Shias, are led by masters, or shaykhs, who initiate their members.¹⁵⁴

The hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, draws Muslims from around the world. Saudi Arabia's statistics authority counted 1,673,230 pilgrims in 2025, of whom 1,506,576 came from outside the kingdom.¹⁶

What questions are Muslims debating?

Three recent debates concern the place of Islamic law in the state, who counts as a fellow Muslim, and how to fix the start of the holy months.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

Islamic law and the state. In its broadest sense, Pew explains, sharia means the ethical principles set down in the Quran and in Muhammad's example, the sunnah. Fiqh is the human work of codifying and interpreting those principles, and Muslim scholars still debate where one ends and the other begins.¹⁷

Iran's constitution, which makes Islam and the Twelver Jafari school the official religion, requires that all laws be based on Islamic criteria and makes the jurists of its Guardian Council the judges of that.²⁰ Abdullahi An-Na'im, a Muslim scholar of law and human rights, argues the reverse: state enforcement of sharia betrays the Quran's insistence that faith be accepted freely, so the state should be secular and its laws based on reasons citizens of every religion can share.²¹ In Pew's surveys of 2008 to 2012, regional medians of support for sharia as official law ranged from 84 percent in South Asia to 12 percent in Central Asia.¹⁷

Who counts as a fellow Muslim. The Amman Message began as a statement issued in Amman, Jordan, in November 2004 by Abdullah II, king of Jordan. In July 2005 a conference of 200 Muslim scholars from 50 countries, meeting in Amman, issued its Three Points. They declared that followers of the four Sunni schools of law, the Jafari and Zaydi Shia schools, the Ibadi school, and the Zahiri school are all Muslims. They added that no one who practices true Sufism may be declared an apostate.¹⁸²² Its website counts over 500 scholars who endorsed it.²²

Not all Muslims agree: in five of seven Middle Eastern and North African countries Pew surveyed, at least four in ten Sunnis said Shias are not Muslims, while in Iraq and Lebanon overwhelming majorities accepted them.²³

Seeing the moon. Each Islamic month begins with the new crescent moon, and by tradition at least two trustworthy witnesses must report it. Some Muslim countries rely on astronomical calculation instead, so dates often differ by a day.¹⁹ Al-Bukhari's Hadith collection includes reports in which Muhammad tells believers to begin and end the Ramadan fast on seeing the crescent, and to complete thirty days if clouds hide it.²⁴

Irfan Kabiruddin, imam of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, told NPR that busier modern lives are no reason to change a practice kept for fourteen centuries: I don't think that's a real legit excuse²⁵.²⁵

In 2006 the Fiqh Council of North America adopted calculation. It held that sighting the crescent is not an act of worship in itself, only a means of knowing the start of the month with certainty, and that Muhammad relied on sighting because his community could not then calculate.²⁶²⁵

Hostility toward Muslims. Pew Research Center's report for 2023, published in 2026, found that Muslims were harassed by governments or social groups in 143 of the 198 countries and territories it studied.²⁷ Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident in the year, whether physical or nonphysical.²⁷ The figure shows how many countries, not how severe the harassment was or how many incidents occurred.²⁷

Christianity vs Islam sets the two faiths side by side, and the book Christianity vs Islam goes further.