Muslimer utgjør en fjerdedel av jordas befolkning, viser en undersøkelse. Av dem lever en firedel i land hvor de er en minoritet, viser tall fra Pew Forum.
I rene tall regnes 1,57 milliarder som muslimer, mens hele 2.25 milliarder regnes som kristne.
Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.
Nearly two out of three of the world's Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.
India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.
China has more Muslims than Syria.
Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.
And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.
The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world's Muslims, trail a very distant second.
There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, «Mapping the Global Muslim Population,» by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.
There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.
Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.
«Overall, the number is higher than I expected,» he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
Pew har spurt om folk er shia eller sunni. Dette er et svært sensitivt spørsmål. Man nekter å svare, men sier bare «muslim».
One in three of the world's Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.
Huge as the project of mapping the world's Muslim population is, it is only the first step in a Pew Forum undertaking.
Next year, the think tank intends to release a report projecting Muslim population growth into the future, and then the researchers intend to do the whole thing over again with Christians, followed by other faith groups.