The number of Muslims living in the US has increased by a million in the past decade, and if that growth rate continues Muslims could replace religious Jews as America's second largest religious group, after Christians, by 2040, according to a study.
The respected Pew Research Center estimates that around 1.1 per cent of the total US population is Muslim, and that in 2007, there were approximately 2.35 million Muslims living in the US. According to Pew's projections, the Muslim population, which increases by around 100,000 people per year, is growing much faster than the country's Jewish population, and by 2050 will reach 8.1 million, or 2.1 per cent of the nation's total population – nearly twice today's share.
The study shows that the increase is not due to religious conversions, because around the same number of Americans convert to Islam as those who leave Islam.
'Indeed, while about one in five American Muslim adults were raised in a different faith tradition and converted to Islam, a similar share of Americans who were raised Muslim now no longer identify with the faith,' the study says.
Instead, many of these Muslim Americans moved to the US from other countries.
According to a separate Pew study, a majority of Americans believe that 'having an increasing number of people from many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities is a positive for the US'.
Nonetheless, hate crimes and assaults against Muslim Americans are increasing each year, and there were more assaults against Muslim Americans in 2016 than in 2001, the year of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new hate crimes statistics from the FBI.
In 2016, there were 307 incidents of anti-Muslim hate crimes – a 19 per cent increase from 2015. However, the largest number of all types of hate crimes against a religious group was toward Jewish Americans.
'In 2016, there were 684 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents, marking a slight increase from 664 in 2015,' according to Pew. 'By comparison, in 2016, there were 62 hate crimes against Catholics and 15 against Protestants.'
