October 28, 2002
Muslims claim count wrong; others affirm it
___NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Muslim leaders have registered displeasure over the headcounts in a new study on religion in America.
___The study's estimate of the number of Muslims in America--1.6 million--is far below the 6 million to 7 million adherents Muslim leaders often assert in the media.
___"They may claim whatever they want to claim, but we refuse to accept this report," Faiz Rehman, communications director for the American Muslim Council, told the Washington Post after the release of "Religious Congregations and Membership," a sweeping study conducted each decade for the past 50 years.
___Tallies for Muslims and Jews are new features of the study during the 1990s.
___"There was no intention, desire, question of trying to distort or fudge the data at all," said Ken Sanchagrin, director of the study and a sociology professor at Mars Hill College in North Carolina.
___The Muslim estimate, Sanchagrin told the Post, was based on reports received from about a third of the 1,209 mosques across the country. Also factored into the count were comparisons with statistics related to immigrant and conversion to Islam.
___The "Religious Congregations and Membership" researchers "are grossly wrong," Rehman contended in the Post, "and they are not serving the country well if they continue to marginalize Muslims."
___The Post, however, cited two studies last year that sided with the "Religious Congregations and Membership" data: The City University of New York's Graduate Center, which tallied 1.1 million Muslims in America, and 1.8 million if children are counted, and the American Jewish Committee, which reported 2.8 million U.S. Muslims. The Associated Press noted, meanwhile, that the researchers for the new study described their 1.6 million estimate as reflecting those active in mosques, not the total American Muslim population.
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