A Sharp Dip in the Count of American Muslims

Now that our Revered Leader Barack Hussein Obama, may his name be only praised, has informed us that we live in a Muslim nation -- after having previously said that the United States was no longer a Christian or Jewish nation -- it has occurred to some people to ask:

How many Muslims are in America, anyway?

Islamic groups like CAIR like to throw around the figure of 7-8 million.

But it may be less than 2 million.

Daniel Pipes at the New York Post has done some digging.

How many Muslims live in the United States?

Until now, basically, no one has had any idea. By law, the U.S. Census cannot ask questions about religion. There are also plenty of other difficulties in coming up with a number, starting with the problem of defining who is a Muslim: Does one include non-standard believers like Louis Farrakhan and the Druze?

Uncertainty has generated some wildly divergent numbers. A large 1990 demographic survey counted 1.3 million Muslims. In 1998, a Pakistani newspaper put the number at 12 million. Even the usually authoritative Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches found 527,000 American Muslims in 1996 and six times as many (3.3 million) in 1998.

Needing some kind of consensus figure, Muslim organizations came up with a self-acknowledged "guestimation" of 6 million, which this year they decided to raise to 7 million.

These numbers were so widely adopted (even by this writer) that they acquired a sheen of authority. But repetition does not transform a guess into a fact.

Fortunately, the smog of imprecision finally lifted last week, with the appearance of two authoritative studies by highly regarded demographers. (Each study relied on respondents' religious self-identification.) Interestingly, they agreed on a very similar number, one much smaller than the old guestimate.

The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 carried out by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York polled more than 50,000 people and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million.

Meanwhile, the University of Chicago's Tom Smith reviewed prior national surveys and (in a study sponsored by the American Jewish Committee) found that the best estimate puts the Muslim population in 2000 at 1,886,000.

By my calculator, that makes Muslims about three-quarters of one percent of the U.S. population. Naturally these totals have really pissed off CAIR and the American Muslim Council.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) furiously accused Smith's report of working "to block Muslim political participation."

The American Muslim Council (AMC) charged Smith with nothing less than trying to "deny the existence of 4 1/2 million American Muslims" and blamed him for "tearing at the very heart of America."

The AMC also amusingly claimed that its own estimate of "more than 7 million" Muslims came from the 2000 Census figures - erroneously thinking that the Census asks about religion.

Oh, and that's the same AMC which in 1992 pressured a researcher named Fareed Nu'man to find 6 million Muslims in the country; Nu'man later testified that he counted just 3 million and was fired by the AMC when he refused to inflate his number above 5 million.

The United States is not, technically, a religious country. It is a constitutional Republic whose principles are based on Judao-Christian principles. It does not enshrine any particular religion or sect as the "state" religion, and yet the people of America have been, and still are, overwhelmingly religious anyway.

In fact, that's what makes the system work.

It is sad that Barack Hussein Obama feels he must employ an "exaggeration" (let's be kind) and ignore the real strengths of our 233-year-old nation. As Michael Rubin said today,

... the United States is a country built on the very concepts about which Obama now seems embarrassed: freedom, liberty, respect for property, separation of church and state, constitutionalism, and rule-of-law. Rather than pander to Egyptians as if Egypt is just another constituency on a whistle-stop tour, perhaps Obama should emphasize our freedoms as the core of the American brand name.

I'm afraid our president doesn't like our system well enough to promote it.