Muslims make up under 5 percent of Europe’s population

Evidence

Today there are a little less than 20 million Muslims living in Europe, short of 5 percent of Europe’s total population (depending, of course, on what one includes in Europe’s stretch). While numbers are opaque not least because European countries have tended to avoid ethnoracial census tallies, Muslim presence ranges from a high of 9 percent in France, between 5 and 6 percent in the Netherlands, 5 and 4 percent respectively in Denmark and Belgium, to between 3 and 4 percent each in Germany and Sweden and under 3 percent in Britain and Spain. A legacy of postcolonial migration to former colonizing metropoles, refugees from global trouble spots, and vigorous guest worker programs in the wake of aging and upwardly mobile European populations unable to sustain the sort of tax base necessary to extend their retirement benefits. This represents the population push and pull promoted by neoliberal policies at both ends of the strings of attachment, by the shrinking space-times exercising the imaginaries of populations as much in Europe as in Muslim worlds. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 862

Largescale Muslim migration to Western Europe began several decades ago. Today, there are over 20 million Muslims in Europe and they make up 5% of the population. Nearly 10% of France is Muslim, and Muslims constitute close to half the population of some major European cities. — Michael A. Reynolds and Thomas D. Grant, The Future of Europe and Its Muslims, 41

Categorization

• XREF: Numbers on European Muslim populations connect to Goldberg’s broader account of racial Europeanization and to contemporary demographic-panic discourse.
• SEED: A data-driven framing of ‘Europe’s Muslim question’ by the numbers — worth an essay interrogating whose projections these are and what they assume about fertility and migration.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 862; Michael A. Reynolds and Thomas D. Grant, The Future of Europe and Its Muslims:…, 41