9781422281109

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I SLAM : C ORE B ELIEFS AND P RACTICES

Muslims around the Globe These questions become all the more important as the number of Muslims continues to increase rapidly. Islam is the fastest-growing reli- gion in the world. Most estimates now put the worldwide Muslim pop- ulation at nearly 2 billion people, which means that almost 24 percent of all humans are Muslims. Islam has surpassed the older religions Hinduism and Buddhism to become the second-largest religion in the world; only Christianity, with about 33 percent of the global popula- tion, has more followers. The founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632 C . E .), first reported his revelations from Allah in the early seventh century. Within just a few decades, Muhammad’s religious movement had attracted converts and consolidated power throughout his homeland, the Arabian Peninsula, which is located between Africa and Asia. Today, that heritage remains strong in the Arab countries of the Middle East, where 90 to 95 percent of citizens claim Islam as their faith. But Islam never knew borders and Muslims believed Allah had commanded them to spread their faith. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, Islam had spread into Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today most Muslims are not Arabs, and Islam is the dominant religion in many countries outside the Arabian Peninsula. The four countries with the highest numbers of Muslims among their citizens—Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India—are located in Asia, not the Middle East. In many countries of Africa and southern Asia, more than 50 per- cent of the population follows Islam. And millions of Muslims live in Western Europe and the United States, thanks to emigration from Muslim countries and increasing conversions among European and American citizens. In the United States, for example, the rate of con- version among African Americans has exploded since the 1960s. Islam among Other Religions The word Islam comes from the Arabic verb aslama , which means “submitted.” The word Muslim is also Arabic and refers to a person