Islam

Muslims, both Shia and Sunni, account for 23.2 percent of the world’s population.¹ In 2015, there were 1.8 billion Muslims around the world.² Approximately 60 percent of the global Muslim population live in Asian nations — Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey. Twenty percent are located in the Middle East and North Africa — Egypt, Algeria and Morocco.³ One fifth of Muslims in countries where they are a religious minority. Though India has the third largest population of Muslims worldwide, Islam is not the majority religion in India. Muslims are also a religious minority in China, though it has a larger Islamic population than Syria.⁴ Of the global Muslim population, 10–13 percent are Shia and 87–90 percent are Sunni.⁵ The majority of Shia affiliated Muslims live in Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.⁶