How Many Muslims?

“The Muslim Population of the United States: The Methodology of Estimates” by Tom W. Smith, in Public Opinion Quarterly (Fall 2002), Journals Fulfillment Dept., Univ. of Chicago Press, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, Ill. 60637.

How many Muslims live in the United States? The news media have reported many estimates—most of them vastly inflated, according to Smith, who is director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. And the estimates have become more inflated since 9/11.

During the past year, news media reports have put the Muslim population at between five and eight million. These calculations average out to 6.7 million, or 2.4 percent of the U.S. population. But about half of these estimates come from Muslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America; most of the rest come from general reference works such as The World Almanac. Not one, Smith writes, is “based on a scientifically sound or explicit methodol­ogy. . . . All can probably be characterized as guesses or assertions.”

Smith thinks the most reliable numbers come from public-opinion surveys in which people are asked about their religious affiliation. He cites 11 surveys conducted since 1998. Their results: Muslims make up between 0.2 and 0.6 percent of the U.S. population. Allowing for the fact that language barriers and other problems probably lead to an undercount of Muslims, Smith estimates that America’s Muslim population might constitute as much as 0.67 percent of the population. That’s only 1.9 million people, a far cry from the five to eight million routinely suggested in the nation’s newspapers and TV news shows.