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 in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says. Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report did not publish figures for world-wide populations of other major religions, but said the United States-based Pew Forum planned similar reports on growth prospects for world-wide Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism.
"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, entitled The Future of the Global Muslim Population, was part of a Pew Forum program analysing religious change and its impact on societies around the world. It said about 60 percent of the world's Muslims will 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 in 2010 to 1.7 percent in 2030, "making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States today," the study said.