Is Islam on its way to become the World’s Largest Religion?

Despite the negative image portrayed by media all over the world, Islam is still growing faster than the World’s population. If this trend continues, the reports suggest that Islam will take over Christianity to become World’s largest religion by 2070. This analysis was made by US-based Pew Research Centre which studied the changes in religious profile of the world.

The current growth rate, according to the report, suggests that growth of Muslims, Christians and World population between 2010 and 2050 is expected to be 73%, 35% and 37% respectively. There are a lot of interesting stats that can be drawn from this research which include:

• India will take over Indonesia to become the country with biggest Muslim population by 2050.
• 11.2% of Europe’s population will be Muslims.
• Atheists will decline from 16% to around 13% by 2050.
• In France and UK, the Christian population will become less than 50%.
• 1 in 50 people in United Stated will be Muslim. American Muslim population will be around 2.1% of the total population (rising from 0.9%).
• Muslims born babies will begin to outnumber Christian births by 2035. (The reason being a relatively high fertility rate of Muslims.)
• By 2050, number of Muslims will be around 2.76 Billion (around 29.7% of World’s population).
• 7 in 10 babies will be born to either Muslim or Christian families by 2060.

There are several reasons for this expected growth of Muslim population around the world. One of them is the relative fertility rate of Muslim families as they tend to have more children than other 7 largest ethnic groups. Also, Muslims currently have the youngest median page (24) of all religious groups. Another fact is the increased rate of conversions to Islam as compared to other religions while there are a lot people who are leaving Christianity which will hinder the rate of increase of Christianity. Lastly, the Muslim Dominant areas around the world (parts of Africa and Middle East) are expected to have the biggest population increases.