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Hampered by Islam's relative newness in America, as well as political sensitivities, experts struggle and spar over estimates of the number of Muslims practicing here.
Oct 31, 2001 | How many Muslims are there in America?
The answer to that seemingly straightforward question is proving difficult to answer. And following the events of Sept. 11, attempts to estimate figures have produced palpable friction between Jewish and Muslim advocacy groups, each touting its own population surveys and methodologies, and turning a typically scholarly pursuit into a politically charged one.
The results, says Dave Roozen, director of the Hartford Seminary Institute for Religion Research, is an unprecedented battle between faith groups openly questioning the size of communities.
"Other inter-religious battles were fought a long time ago," he says. "This is the only one still ongoing. Each side brings its experts and each have somewhat plausible arguments. On one level, the political issues are the same. It's just much more intense now, and the stakes are more visible."
Last spring a Muslim-sponsored study, "The Mosque in America: A National Portrait," claimed there were between 6 and 7 million Muslims in America. The report, although part of a larger study of American congregations called "Faith Communities Today" coordinated by Hartford Seminary, was sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, who leads the largest African-American Muslim organizations, and the Islamic Circle of North America.
The study's sometimes startling findings, that the number of Muslims associated with mosques had increased 300 percent since 1994, certainly bolstered the notion that Islam was among the country's fastest-growing religions.
But it also raised eyebrows, particularly within America's Jewish community, which numbers roughly 6 million. As the Baltimore Jewish Times reported last spring, "Jewish leaders worry that this [Muslim population] surge will generate political influence that could skew U.S. Mideast policy."
In fact, "The Mosque in America" report came just months after Arab and Muslim groups weighed in with their first ever presidential election endorsement, signaling a new political emergence for the group as a sought-after voting block. (The groups endorsed Republican George W. Bush.)
"There's no question those numbers were troubling," says Murray Friedman, director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. It is particularly troubling, he says, for a Jewish American community whose numbers are shrinking, thanks to marriages outside the faith, and lower birth rates.
On Oct. 23, the American Jewish Committee responded by releasing its own report, "Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States." Written by Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the study suggested the more accurate number of Muslims in America was just 1,876,000.
Wrote Smith: "Even if high-side estimates based on local surveys, figures from mosques, and ancestry and immigration statistics are given more weight than the survey-based numbers, it is hard to accept estimates that Muslims are greater than 1 percent of the population, or 2,814,000."
The survey had immediate implications for the media. Back on Oct. 20, the New York Times reported the American Muslim population at between "6 million to 7 million." Days after the AJC estimate though, the paper included a new caveat suggesting the actual domestic Muslim population was "estimated variously at 2 million to 6 million." (Actually, other estimates run much higher than 6 million, all the way up to 10 million.)
