A new report forecasts that the number of Muslims around the world will grow over the next 20 years at twice the rate of non-Muslims but that the rapid growth will level off. With more Muslim women getting educations and jobs, people migrating to cities and living standards improving, the report says, the birthrate in majority-Muslim countries will come to more closely resemble the pattern in other nations.
Predictions that Europe will become a majority-Muslim “Eurabia” are unfounded, according to the report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group.
Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.
