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Polling the Islamic World

M ore than 1.6 billion people throughout the world follow the religion called Islam , and are therefore known as Muslims . Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population and live in practically every country in the world. However, most of the world’s Muslim population is concentrated in an area that stretch- es across thousands of miles, from western Africa to the Philippines and China. This region, which includes more than fifty countries, is often referred to as the Islamic world or the Muslim world. At the center of the Islamic world is the Middle East, which includes the Arabian Peninsula (once called Arabia) where Islam was born about 1,400 years ago. Most Muslims are not Arabs—it is estimated that only about 18 percent of Muslims in the world are Arabs. The majority of Muslims come from non-Arab Asian and African countries. The country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia, which is thousands of miles to the east of the Arabian Peninsula.

Opposite: Muslims from all over the world circumambulate an ancient shrine, the Kaaba, after completing their dawn prayer in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

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