The census, by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies in Chicago, found that American Muslims almost doubled in the past decade.
It estimated that Muslims are now numbered at 2.6 million in 2010, from only one million in 2001.
Unofficial estimates put the number of Muslims in the US at between six to seven million...
The census also found that Muslims now outnumber Jews in much of the American Midwest and South.
The report attributes the sharp rise in the number of US Muslims to conversions and immigration.
The survey also estimates that there are more than 2,000 mosques across the United States, of which 166 are located in Texas.
An earlier Muslim study found that the number of mosques in the US jumped in the past decade to reach more than 2,000 mosques.
The study, released in February, also found that US Muslims are estimated at seven million.So which is it--2.6 or 7? And how is it possible for there to be two estimates that are so vastly different?
Update: Here's another (and altogether weirder) way to put it--counterintuitively, the number of Muslims in the U.S. has doubled since 9/11.
2 comments:
Gross--and probably grossly dishonest--overestimates of the number of Moslems in the U. S. have been around for a while. Some of these "estimates" have been achieved by counting all persons with Middle Eastern-sounding last names, who show up on databases like voting rolls, or who identify themselves as being of Middle Eastern extraction in polls, as automatically being practitioners of the Religion of Peace. The reality is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of Arab-Americans are Christian; e.g, here in Jacksonville, Florida, we have a very large Arab-American population . . . which is nearly all Christian (predominantly Catholics, but with a sprinkling of Orthodox and Protestants).
In some cases, the inflated numbers are arrived at by shamelessly applying arbitrary fudge factors to uncertain estimates of mosque congregation size, e.g, a CAIR reckoning in the early 2000s, that took already inflated congregation numbers given by a relatively small number of imams, averaged them, multiplied the average by the estimated number of U. S. mosques, then multiplied that by a factor of three (just because!), to arrive at a number of about six million U. S. Moslems. That was later, apparently by some miraculous process, bumped up to eight million. And people question Moslem claims to have advanced mathematics during the Dark Ages!
I call it djinning up the stats.
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