How many Muslims live in the United States? - By Daniel Pipes

SHARIA LAW .. OR, THE US CONSTITUTION?!

by Daniel Pipes
April 22, 2003
updated Nov 22, 2009


Islam is widely touted as "the fastest growing religion in the United States," so how does one explain thatThe World Almanac and Book of Facts has these figures for Muslims in the United States:

• 1997 edition (p. 644) says 5.1 million
• 2003 edition (p. 635) says 2.8 million

No, the population did not actually decrease; to understand this reduction in the estimate, see my October 2001 analysis, "How Many U.S. Muslims?" In it, I report on two recent surveys, by the American Religious Identification Survey 2001 and Tom Smith of the University of Chicago, which found the number of U.S. Muslims to be under two million. So, it appears that the almanac's editors stopped accepting the overblown Islamist estimates as accurate and instead relied on scholarly and reliable work. A good round estimate is that Muslims make up just under 1 percent of the U.S. population. (April 22, 2003)

Aug. 15, 2003 update: Using information from 1990 and 2000 national censuses, John R. Logan and and Glenn Deane find under 2,900,000 Muslims living in the United States.

June 10, 2004 update: Islamist organizations, however, continue to make fantasy claims. Today theIslamic Society of North America issued a press release indicating that it represents "10 million American Muslims." Of note too is the statement by a journalist in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (in February 2001), presumably influenced by one of the Islamist sources of the article, that Islam is "the second-most popular religion after Catholicism" in the United States.

Oct. 15, 2004 update: Abdel Rachid Mohammad, the first Islamic chaplain in the U.S. armed forces, tells Agence France-Presse, that there are eight to ten million Muslims in the United States. Given his official capacity, this inflated number is especially unfortunate.

June 14, 2005 update: In an undated commentary on the homepage of his organization, The Mosque Cares, W. Deen Mohammed writes that "Partly through conversion but mainly through immigration, the number of Muslims has now risen to three or four million." What a refreshing change from the boosterism of the Islamists. (Also of note is that he uses the spelling G-d, as in "there is but One G-d and one human family."

June 21, 2006 update: "There are almost 8 million Muslims in America," asserts Daisy Khan, executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement, in a puff-piece produced by the U.S. Department of State.

Oct. 31, 2006 update: Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna has the interesting idea in "The Numbers Game" to extrapolate from U.S. experience and slash boosterish estimates for Muslim populations around the world by 1/3. Instead of 21 million Muslims in western Europe, for example, he counts 13.5.

May 22, 2007 update: According to "Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream" a study from the Pew Research Center:

The Pew study projects approximately 1.5 million adult Muslim Americans, 18 years of age and older. The total Muslim American population is estimated at 2.35 million, based on data from this survey and available Census Bureau data on immigrants' nativity and nationality. It is important to note that both of these estimates are approximations.

Feb. 22, 2008 update: Pew offers another estimate in its "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey," where it finds the U.S.-based Muslim population to be 0.6 percent of the total. Given that latter is about 300 million, the Muslim population would be about 1.8 million.

Apr. 16, 2008 update: Newsweek's Lorraine Ali writes of "the nation's 8 million Muslims."

Mar. 9, 2009 update: The American Religious Identification Survey, based at Trinity College, conducted by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, finds that the number of Muslims in the United States has increased from 527,000 in 1990 to 1,104,000 in 2001 to 1.349,000 in 2008.

June 4, 2009 update: Defying all we know about this topic, Barack Obama today announced the figure of "seven million American Muslims" in the course of his major speech on Islam delivered in Cairo. I comment on his reasons for doing this at "Assessing Obama's Cairo Speech." Simultaneously, the Department of Justice put out a backrounder, "Outreach and Enforcement Efforts to Protect American Muslims," that retreats slightly from Obama's preposterous number, instead referring to "the nearly seven million American Muslims living in the United States."

June 21, 2009 update: Obama retreated substantially, though not enough, from his seven million figure, saying in an interview with the Pakistan newspaper Dawn, "we have 5 million Muslims, which would make us larger than many other countries that consider themselves Muslim countries."

Sep. 15, 2009 update: Obama may have retreated but U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the old figure at the Department of State iftar this evening, referring to "the nearly 7 million Muslims in our country."


SOURCE: DANIEL PIPES.ORG


My note:


Well, here's a question:  How many Muslim "refugees" have been allowed into the USA in the past two years? or, the last 5 years?  How many are here illegally?  Legally? Hiding behind a so-called "religion" when Islam is political, and the cause of terrorism around the world, don't you think it would be a good idea if our federal government got a handle on the immigration status of Muslim immigrants?  After all, Isalm ideology contradicts all the laws of the USA; and Americans are not sitting idly by awaiting for Sharia law to replace our Constitution.

"SHARIA FOR AMERICA"  (YEAH, RIGHT!!)