Islam, the second largest religion in the world, is rapidly increasing across the globe and has the lowest median age as half of the Muslims are 23-year-old or younger, compared to 28 for the whole world population, according to the recent study conducted by the Washington-based Pew Forum.
The study – based on analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers – finds 2.2 billion Christians (32 per cent of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23 per cent), 1 billion Hindus (15 per cent), nearly 500 million Buddhists (seven per cent) and 14 million Jews (0.2 per cent) around the world as of 2010.
“Muslims are going to grow as a share of the world’s population and an important part of that is this young age structure,” Pew Forum demographer Conrad Hackett said in a new study.
The median age of Muslims (23 years) is younger than the median age of the world’s overall population (28), it said adding that all the other groups are older than the global median.
“The Global Religious Landscape” study by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Muslims are numbered 1.6 billion, making up 23% of the world’s 6.9 billion population.
“The overwhelming majority (87-90%) of Muslims are Sunnis; about 10-13% are Shiite Muslims,” it said.
India, the report said is home to 11 per cent of the world Muslim population – the second largest after Indonesia.
The 10 countries with the largest number of Muslims are home to fully two-thirds (66 per cent) of all Muslims.
The largest share lives in Indonesia (13 per cent), followed by India (11 per cent), Pakistan (11 per cent), Bangladesh (8 per cent), Nigeria (5 per cent), Egypt (5 per cent), Iran (5 per cent), Turkey (5 per cent), Algeria (2 per cent) and Morocco (2 per cent).
Muslims make up a majority of the population in 49 countries.
Nearly three-quarters of all Muslims (73 per cent) live in these countries.
Although Muslims are a minority in India (14 per cent of the total population), India nonetheless has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world.
A new British census released earlier this month found that Islam is the fastest-growing faith in Britain.
It found that the proportion of Muslims rose from 3.0 percent to 4.8 percent, becoming the fastest growing religion in Britain.
A census by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies in Chicago in May also found that Islam is among the fastest-growing religions in the United States.
Hinduism, the study said, is the most geographically concentrated of the eight religious groups analysed in this report. Less than one per cent of Hindus live outside Asia and the Pacific.
Pew said India has the largest share (47 per cent) of all members of other religions, including millions of Sikhs and Jains.
-Siasat News