Dear Paul Thank you very much indeed for your kind words. I shall continue to pursue my own personal research…
Thank you for all your hard work on this important service which will be greatly missed, but all the best…
Thank you for your diligence in unearthing broken links on the site. Regarding religious profession of prisoners, there were surveys…
1) FYI. There is an incorrect link to a spreadsheet on the page here: https://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/belief-in-britain-1939-2009/conventional-belief/belief-in-god-divinity-of-christ-and-the-resurrection/. The spreadsheet is for "Belief…
Dear Colin I am sorry that you have experienced difficulties in getting data from the site. Please go to www.brin.ac.uk/figures/churches-and-churchgoers/…
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5 responses to “How Many Muslims?”
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The Pew estimate seems a little high, but it’s not far out of line with official (if unpublished) estimates. If we accept the series 1,591,000 (2001 census), 1,870,000 (2004 LFS), 2,422 (2008 LFS), the annual growth rate rose from 5.5 to 6.7%. Projecting forward from 2008 at 7% would give us 2,773,000 in 2010, compared to the Pew figure of 2,869,000.
The Citizenship Survey is not useful for estimating the Muslim population, because it includes large ethnic minority booster samples that are then weighted using external assumptions about the relative size of those subpopulations.
I’m highly sceptical of claims that Muslims were significantly underenumerated in the census, as are experts including Tariq Modood. One check is to look at religion by country of birth (remembering that more than half of British Muslims were born overseas). The total number of people born in Pakistan and Bangladesh who are recorded in the census as having no religion or religion not stated is a mere 28,635. Even if we added all of those to the Muslim column, the total would rise by less than 2%.
Of the four possible reasons for the rapid increase of the British Muslim population mentioned by Sophie Gilliat-Ray, only the first two (immigration and natural increase) are important. Her reference to ‘the growing birth rate’ is misleading: the Muslim birth rate is declining towards the national average, but it is still high enough to produce substantial growth. As for the other two factors, conversions to Islam contribute relatively little to the total, and there is no evidence that people of Muslim heritage are now more likely than before to identify themselves as such.
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[…] The next largest religious group in the IHS was the Muslim community, at 4.2% of the British population (4.7% in England and 1.2% in Wales and Scotland). This equates to 2,520,000 individuals (against the mid-2009 population estimate, the latest available), lower by 350,000 than the calculation just released by Pew which was the subject of our post at http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=598. […]
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[…] 174). As BRIN noted when this figure was given a preliminary airing by Pew on 16 September last (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=598), it seems a little […]
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[…] Re: UK PM: Multiculturalism has failed Originally Posted by Jetboogieman Religious Demography of Britain… Christian: 71.75% No religion: 14.81% Not stated: 15% Muslim: 2.97% Hindu: 1.06% Sikh: 0.63% Jewish: 0.5% Other: 0.29% Buddhist: 0.28% That was 10 years ago. the current percentage of Muslims is much higher — closer to 4.6% British Religion in Numbers: news […]
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[…] against Islam it gives the impression that all British Muslims are Islamist extremists. If all 2,869,000 British Muslims were extremists, may I suggest that we would have suffered far more domestic atrocities than we […]
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