WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH disavowed the Holy Land Foundation last week, he said that the foundation’s actions were “an affront to millions of Muslim Americans.” The New York Times says there are “six to seven million Muslims living in this country.” Most other newspapers and wire services report the same thing (perhaps because the Society of Professional Journalists recommends these numbers).
From reading the papers and listening to fawning public officials, it seems as though Muslims are everywhere in America. But at the same time, it certainly doesn’t feel as though we’re living in an age of Islamic ascendancy here in America. So how many Muslims are there? The indispensable Statistical Assessment Service (go ahead and bookmark their site, Stats.org, it’s worth it) has sorted through the numbers for us in an essay entitled “A Question of Numbers,” by senior analyst Howard Fienberg. And as it turns out, while there may be no definitive number, “six to seven million” is a gross exaggeration.
The U.S. Census doesn’t ask questions about religious affiliation, and of all the major religions, only the Catholic church has solid data. (Catholics keep track of registered parishioners, baptisms, and funerals, all of which are reported to Rome.)
The claim of “six to seven million Muslims” is based on data provided by two Muslim lobbying groups, the American Muslim Council and the Council on American Islamic Relations. Their numbers come from the 2000 Mosque Study Project. That study supposed 1,209 American mosques and surveyed 631 of them (only 416 responded). The researchers found an average of 340 adults and children classified as active participants, and another 1,629 people who were “associated in any way” with the mosque. This would suggest about 2 million Muslims, but the study’s authors adjusted the number up–for a total of 6 to 7 million “to account for estimates of family members and non-affiliated Muslims.”
There are some problems with this guesstimate. For one thing, the mosques counted their own worshippers. But religious groups are notoriously prone to inflating their numbers. (Fienberg sites a Los Angeles Times report recounting that “the Southern Baptist Convention conducted an audit of membership rolls a few years ago and found that 25 percent of those listed had died or left the faith.”) For another thing, it’s curious to note that in the Mosque Study Project report, 15 percent of the Muslims came from two mosques, which raises questions about how the sample was selected. Other, more disinterested research shows a different picture of Muslim America. And finally, adjusting up 250 percent seems a questionable way to account for family members.
Tom Smith, from the National Opinion Research Center, tried taking a measure using his organization’s General Social Survey. He found only 1.4 million Muslims and then adjusted up to 1.7 million.
Perhaps the best study comes from two researchers at the City University of New York, Barry Kosmin and Egon Mayer, who released findings based on the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which asked 50,281 Americans to identify their religious affiliation. They projected 1.1 million adult Muslims, which they translated to 1.8 million Muslim adults and children.
In their rush to be King of the Victims, AMC and CAIR have tried to puff up the influence of Muslim Americans, and to a large degree, it’s worked. The media–and even some people in the administration–bought it. Too bad the numbers just don’t add up.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
