Muslim Growth in the United Kingdom and Worldwide

The growth of the Muslim community and the decline of church attendance in the United Kingdom seemed to attract perpetual media interest. When a BBC Sunday programme chose five key facts about religion in Britain to explore, one question was when Muslim mosque attendance might overtake Christian churchgoing. What were the numbers behind that interest?

Mosque attendance

At the time of publication, there was no up-to-date, reliable information in the UK on how many Muslims attended a mosque regularly. A comprehensive 1986 survey¹ found that fifty-one percent of Muslims attended one of the main Muslim festivals, such as Idul-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. The article contrasted this with estimates that fifteen to twenty percent of the population attended a Christian church at Easter or Christmas.

The same survey found Friday mosque attendance of sixteen percent, slightly more than double the reported percentage attending a Christian church on an average Sunday. A later BBC poll suggested that Friday attendance had increased slightly. However, the survey also found that sixty-five percent of attendance was by children, making adult attendance more comparable with the adult share of Christian Sunday church attendance.

In the absence of other reliable information, the fifty-one percent result—often rounded to fifty percent—was regularly used to indicate annual attendance or “active Muslims.” Drawing on the 2001 Census figure of 1.6 million Muslims and a then-current projection of 4.3 million by 2040, the article proposed that active Muslims could outnumber Christian church members by 2049 if the underlying trends remained unchanged.

Mosques

The number of registered mosques in the UK had increased from four in 1960 to 314 in 1985 and 618 in 2002. Mosques, like churches, had to be registered by the central Registry Office if lawful marriages were to be solemnised in them. The article noted that many places of Muslim worship were not registered and cited a 2004 Muslim website database containing 1,550 mosques, including prayer rooms and house-mosques.

On that basis, the article suggested an average weekly attendance of perhaps 180 people per mosque, while acknowledging that congregations differed greatly in size. It reported festival attendance of five thousand at the London Central Mosque.

The text cautioned that direct comparison with churches was imperfect. It cited more than forty-eight thousand UK churches, many in rural areas with small congregations, and contrasted this distribution with a model of fewer Muslim meeting places serving more people. It also referred to 4,700 Catholic churches and an average Mass attendance of 360 people.

Muslims worldwide

The number of Muslims, like the number of Christians, was growing worldwide. The article cited 2006 estimates of 2.2 billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims, including nominal adherents. These represented thirty-three percent and twenty-one percent of the world’s population respectively.

It reported annual increases of 1.9% for Muslims, 1.3% for Christians, and 1.2% for the general population. On the assumption that these trends continued, the article suggested that Muslims could eventually outnumber Christians, though not until well into the twenty-second century.

The author stressed that trends rarely continue unchanged. Unknown social, political, and environmental factors could radically alter both UK and worldwide figures.

Evangelical growth

The article divided Christians worldwide into two broad groups: evangelicals and non-evangelicals. It argued that the evangelical proportion was increasing in both developing and developed regions, but for different reasons. In parts of the developing world, especially Africa, it associated growth with conversions. In developed regions, it attributed a rising evangelical share partly to a faster decrease among non-evangelicals.²

This changing share of all Christians was compared with Muslim growth as a percentage of the world’s non-Christian population, using figures attributed to the World Christian Encyclopedia. The author noted that some Muslim growth might come from Christian communities but considered that number too small to affect the comparison materially.

Why was this considered important?

The article described evangelicals and Muslims as the two growing religious movements at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It pointed to religious conflict in Indonesia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan and anticipated that such clashes might continue.

Its concluding concern was how Christians should prepare for challenges to religious conviction while responding in an uncompromising yet gracious manner at national and local levels.