Is Islam Really The World's Fastest Growing Religion--Or Is Disenchantment Growing?

Back in 2007, a Pew poll revealed that the number of Muslims in the US was grossly exaggerated:

The Pew Study refutes two of the most regular claims offered by CAIR. The first is the 8 million Muslim myth - the attempt by CAIR and other Islamist organizations to inflate the Muslim population to claim greater political clout. But Pew estimates only 2.35 million Muslims - less than one percent of the total population. This is in line with most other official studies conducted over the past decade by Pew, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and others.

I don't know if the number of Muslims in the world is also exaggerated or not, but the Muslim claim that Islam is the world's second fastest growing religion is open to challenge:

It’s true that Islam (as well as atheism and universalism) is growing in the West, mostly because of high birth rates among Muslims and immigration, but the exploding growth of evangelical Christianity around the world through conversion is unreported. The analysis is distorted because of the lack of reporting from places like Africa, where nearly half of the population is estimated to be Christian. In other places like China, news of such trends is suppressed, leaving few to know that some estimates put the Christian population there at up to 111 million. There may be more members in the underground evangelical movement there than in the 75-million strong Chinese Communist Party. It’s been reported that 10,000 Chinese convert to Christianity per day. That number may be a stretch, but if current trends hold, predictions that China will become the country with the largest number of Christians by the middle of the century could come true.

Keep in mind that the author of this post is Ryan Mauro, who--besides being the founder of WorldThreats.com and and an intelligence analyst with the Asymmetrical Warfare and Intelligence Center (AWIC)--is also the national security advisor to the Christian Action Network.

Mauro writes that those tracking the number of Muslims need not only to take account of "Friday Muslims" but also of the disenchantment among Muslims with Islam due to economic conditions and religious fanaticism:

One top Islamic scholar in Libya says that 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity every day and Walden writes that evangelist Wolfgang Simpson says that “more Muslims have come to Christ in the last two decades than in all of history.” He writes that the mufti of the Malaysian state of Perak says that about 250,000 Muslims in his country have filed to officially leave Islam, including 100,000 that have converted to Christianity. The mufti warned that this number doesn’t include those who are non-practicing Muslims [See: Muslims Leaving Islam In Droves].

It is undeniable that Islam is growing in the West, but there are signs that the number of Muslims that don’t diligently practice the faith is increasing just as is the case with Christianity. In February 2005, the Sunday Times wrote that “one estimate suggests that as many as 15 per cent of Muslims in Western societies have lost their faith.” A Pew poll in July 2007 found that Muslim-Americans are in third place in how many describe religion as playing a “very important” role in their lives, with 72 percent affirming the statement as compared to 79 percent of white evangelicals and 85 percent of black Protestants. Most interestingly, only 50 percent of Muslim-Americans take their holy book, the Koran, literally, whereas 66 percent of white evangelicals and 68 percent of black Protestants take the Bible literally.

Maybe it really is time to look into how many Muslims there actually are in the world--and if their numbers are getting larger, or smaller. It's something for Great Britain to take into account before it gives Muslims the keys to the city country.

Technorati Tag: Islam and Muslims.