Two out of three Muslims are Asian, reports Peter Beaumont (witness the Chinese mosque above). A new survey – Mapping the Global Muslim Population – reminds us that Islam is not to be identified with the Arab world, and the Arab world is not to be identified with Islam. Fifty demographers and social scientists have analysed thousands of sources and given the most accurate picture to date of Islam’s global distribution.
The world’s Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly one in four people practise Islam, according to the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published the survey. This compares to 2.25 billion Christians.
The top five Muslim countries in the world include only one in the Middle East ‑ Egypt ‑ behind Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, in that order. Russia, the survey shows, has more Muslims than the populations of Libya and Jordan combined. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. China has a bigger Muslim population than Syria…
Brian Grim, one of the researchers, said: “We started on this work because the estimates for the number of the world’s Muslims ranged so widely, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion. For people who do this kind of work, perhaps the figures are not surprising but there are a lot of highly educated people who do not know that one in four are Muslim.”
A similar survey is planned by the Pew Forum on the distribution of Christians.
Bridges and Tangents 
Statistics such as these once again pose a tough question to the Church. How does it reconcile the uniqueness of Jesus with the fact that the majority of the world’s people worship God through other belief systems? The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, with its talk of ‘rays of truth’ in other religions was a radical departure from previous teaching that there was no salvation outside the Church. But it was only a beginning.
Father Frederick Crowe SJ, speaking at an inter-faith conference organised by the Dominicans in Rome recently, said the Church must be more open to the Holy Spirit. ‘If the son lived only a few years in a smal nation, the Spirit of the Lord fills the entire space-time universe.’
If you told Edmund Campion that one day the Pope would be kneeling side by side with the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and that Catholics and Anglicans would even share churches, he would have thought you mad. Back in the Reformation period, such actions would have been unthinkable.
When looking at the future of the Church’s relations with other world faiths, I think we too have to be open to the unthinkable.