Islam’s geographic and demographic spread defies any single cultural or political essence

Evidence

Even a cursory look at the practice of Islam around the world shows this notion to be patently false. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world—85 percent are Sunni and 15 percent are Shi‘a. Within these two main denominations, there are many more branches. Muslim-majority countries and regions span the globe, from Indonesia (the most populous Muslim-majority country) to Pakistan and Bangladesh and to several central Asian countries. Countries with the largest populations of Muslims include Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, and Iran. Moreover, Islam is the majority religion in several sub-Saharan African nations (Somalia, Sudan, and Senegal) and in nations considered European like Albania and Bosnia. These nations also contain other religious and nonreligious minorities (hence the term Muslim-majority countries). India, a predominantly Hindu country, is home to close to two hundred million Muslims. And about a third of Muslims live in countries that are not Muslimmajority nations. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 275

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s core argument against the monolithization of Islam; a usable counter-datum when encountering anyone claiming ‘the Muslim world’ is uniform.
• SHARE: The stat that India alone holds ~200 million Muslims (third largest Muslim population in the world) is a fact most people get wrong and worth sending to anyone writing about South Asia or demography.

Related

• The global Muslim population of 1.8 billion is internally diverse and geographically dispersed (similarity 0.90)
• Global Muslim practice is internally diverse across sects and regions. (similarity 0.88)
• India will host the world’s largest Muslim population by 2060 despite Hindu dominance (similarity 0.84)
• Islam’s internal practice varies by region, branch, and historical era (similarity 0.84)
• India hosts the world’s second-largest Muslim population and may rank first by 2050 (similarity 0.83)
• Most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are not Arab (similarity 0.82)
• Islam’s early expansion produced multiple distinct subcivilizations across three continents (similarity 0.81)
• Islam has varied regionally and adapted to historical transformations. (similarity 0.81)
• Concrete data show Muslim-majority nations integrating modernization and pluralism (similarity 0.81)
• The monolith myth underlies all other claims of Islam’s inherent traits. (similarity 0.80)
• British Muslims are a diverse minority diaspora, not a monolith (similarity 0.80)
• Philological analysis of key texts established Muslims as static subspecies (similarity 0.80)
• Muslim-majority populations grew nearly 50 percent between 1955 and 1970 (similarity 0.80)
• Treating Islam as monolithic enables claims that it is inherently anti-democratic and violent (similarity 0.80)
• The monolithic Islamic mind is a projection, not a reality (similarity 0.80)