Muslims before prayer
Muslims before prayerFlash90

A new poll released by Ipsos entitled "Perils of Perception" highlighted the misperceptions of various publics with regard to key aspects of their country's nature. One of the misperceptions concerns the number of Muslims residing in each country. Most countries think their population is much more Muslim than it actually is, and that the Muslim population is growing exponentially.

Washington, DC - Ipsos’ latest Perils of Perception survey highlights how wrong the public across 40 countries are about key global issues and features of the population in their country. The U.S. is one of the most “ignorant” of the facts of the nations surveyed.

Americans, for example, believe that 1 in 6 Americans are Muslim, while actually only 1 in 100 Americans is Muslim. They also believe that the Muslim population is growing at a much faster rate than it actually is. Americans think that in just four years, in 2020, the Muslim population will make up 23% of Americans, whereas the projected number according to the Pew Research Center is just 1.1%

Other countries also significantly overestimate their Muslim populations. The French, for example, believe that 31% of their population is Muslim when the real number is just 7.5%. The French were worried that by 2020 the Muslims would constitute 40% of their population, whereas the real projected number is 8.3% . Italy, Germany and Belgium also overestimated the size and the growth of their Muslim populations. They estimated that 20% of their populations are Muslim when the actual numbers are below 7%. Other European countries exhibited similar findings, with the Polish nation convinced that Muslims constitute 5% of their population and that that number would grow to 10% by 2020. In fact, the real number of Muslims in Poland is just 0.1% or 1 in 1000.