Most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are not Arab

Evidence

It is commonly assumed that Iranians and Pakistanis are Arab and that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims Arab, despite the fact that there are 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide and that approximately 15 to 20 percent of them are Arab. The majority of the world’s Muslim population is concentrated in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, with sizable populations in Senegal, Uzbekistan, China, and Malaysia. Why are these categories interchangeable when most Muslims are not Arab and when none of the most populous countries are Arab? This conflation enables a particular racial Othering that would not operate in the same way through another conflation, such as, for example, Arab/Christian, Arab/Jew, or Indonesian/Muslim. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 81

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the demographically false but socially entrenched Arab/Muslim conflation.
• XREF: connects to: The global Muslim population of 1.8 billion is internally diverse and geographically dispersed