page_title: Islam in the United States
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Islam in the United States / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: English: The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, Ohio, in Perrysburg Township, Wood County, Ohio
context_page_description: Islam is the third largest religion in the United States, after Christianity and Judaism. A 2017 study estimated that 3.45 million Muslims were living in the United States, about 1.1 percent of the total U.S. population. Pew Research Center has subdivided the Muslim community and their percentages into three subsets, namely Sunnism, Shi'ism and non-denominational Muslims.
  American Muslims come from various backgrounds and, according to a 2009 Gallup poll, are one of the most racially diverse religious groups in the United States. According to a 2017 study done by the Institute for Social Policy, “American Muslims are the only faith community surveyed with no majority race, with 25 percent black, 24 percent white, 18 percent East Asian, 18 percent Arab, 7 percent mixed race, and 5 percent Hispanic”.
  In addition, 50 percent of Muslims are native born while the other 50 percent are foreign born, and 86 percent are citizens. Many native-born American Muslims are African Americans who make up about a quarter of the total Muslim population. Many of them have converted to Islam during the last seventy years.
context_section_description: The U.S. Census Bureau does not collect data on religious identification. Various institutions and organizations have given widely varying estimates about how many Muslims live in the U.S. Tom W. Smith, author of "Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States", said that of twenty estimates he reviewed during a five-year period until 2001, none was "based on a scientifically-sound or explicit methodology. All can probably be characterized as guesses or assertions. Nine came from Muslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council, and the Harvard Islamic Society or unspecified 'Muslim sources'. None of these sources gave any basis for their figures." In 2005, according to The New York Times, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.
  According to CAIR, no scientific count of Muslims in the U.S. has been done and the larger figures should be considered accurate. Some journalists have also alleged that the higher numbers have been inflated for political purposes.
  According to a Pew Forum estimate, in 2017 there were 3.45 million Muslims, constituting about 1.1% of the total U.S. population, compared with 70.6% who follow Christianity, 22.8% unaffiliated, 1.9% Judaism, 0.7% Buddhism, and 0.7% Hinduism.  A Pew Forum report on American religion found that Muslims accounted for 0.9% of American adults in 2014, up from 0.4% in 2007, due largely to immigration. Retention rates were high, at 77%, similar to Hindus (80%) and Jews (75%); most people who leave these religions become unaffiliated, although ex-Muslims were more likely to be Christians than ex-Hindus or ex-Jews were. Conversely, 23% of American Muslims were converts, including 8% from historically black Protestant traditions, 6% from being unaffiliated, 4% from Catholicism, and 3% from mainline or evangelical Protestantism. By race, in 2014, 38% were non-Hispanic white (including Arabs and Iranians, up from 32% in 2007), 28% were Asian (mostly Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, up from 20% in 2007), 28% were black (down from 32%), 4% Hispanic (down from 7%), and 3% of mixed or other race (down from 7%). Since 2007, the black proportion had shrunk, while the white and Asian proportions had grown, mainly due to immigration as most black Muslims were native U.S. blacks.
  In January 2018, the Pew Research Center projected that by 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the second-largest religious group in the U.S. (after Christians). By 2050, the number of American Muslims was projected to be twice the size of the 2017 Muslim population. Pew cited high fertility rates among American Muslims and immigration of Muslims to the U.S. as the reasons for the growth. It said that religious conversion was not expected to be a significant factor, because the number of American converts to Islam is roughly the same as the number of people who leave the religion.
caption: Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, Ohio.
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