Majority Muslim Countries (or Proposed Ones)

Some are bare majorities and these are approximations but the numbers bear thinking about (do unbiased people really want to continue to claim that the religion of so many people is actually evil?) Ethiopia is an interesting one because it has a Coptic Christian flavour at the level of its state. The proposed ones I have included are Turkish Cyprus and Palestine. I have noted especially if the 'country' appears to produce and/or export petroleum crude oil and if it exports very roughly how much mainly because oil is so geopolitically vital for the time being, and if they are members or observers at OPEC, the League of Arab States or the Organization of the Islamic Conference because they may be politically significant groupings.

That gives 50 'countries' (about a quarter of the world's countries) including the fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth most populous: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. Though not majority Muslim the most and second, third and fifth most populous countries (China, India, the US and Brazil) also contain a total of around two hundred million Muslims (mostly in India but including over two million in the US and over twenty million in China). Incidentally, even Israel has over a million Muslim 'full' citizens.

These three countries are majority Muslim but not Members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference: Ethiopia, Western Sahara and Eritrea.

These 11 countries are not majority Muslim but are Members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference: Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Suriname, Togo and Uganda. Kazakhstan has close to a majority if not a majority.

These four countries are not majority Muslim but are Observers at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference: Bosnia, Central African Republic, Thailand and Russia. Bosnia also has close to a majority. Thailand has recently committed civil war-related atrocities against Muslims so this status is also interesting.


1 Afghanistan – Member of Islamic Conference
2 Albania – Small Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of Islamic Conference
3 Algeria – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State
of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
4 Azerbaijan – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of Islamic Conference
5 Bahrain – Small Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference
6 Bangladesh – May Have Oil Reserves, Member of Islamic Conference
7 Brunei – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of Islamic Conference
8 Burkina Faso – Member of Islamic Conference
9 Chad – Small Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
10 Comoros – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
11 Djibouti – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
12 Egypt – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference
13 Eritrea – Observer State at Arab League
14 Ethiopia -
15 Gambia – Member of Islamic Conference
16 Guinea – Member of Islamic Conference
17 Indonesia – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of
Islamic Conference
18 Iran – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of
Islamic Conference
19 Iraq – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State
of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
20 Jordan – Has been an Oil Producer, Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic
Conference
21 Kuwait – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member
State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
22 Kyrgyzstan – Has been an Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
23 Lebanon – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
24 Libya – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member
State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
25 Malaysia – Large Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of Islamic Conference
26 Maldives – Member of Islamic Conference
27 Mali – Member of Islamic Conference
28 Mauritania – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
29 Morocco – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
30 Niger – Has Oil Reserves, Member of Islamic Conference
31 Nigeria – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of
Islamic Conference
32 Oman – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference
33 Pakistan – Has been an Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
34 Palestine – Member of Arab League, May have been an Oil Producer, Member of Islamic
Conference
35 Qatar – Moderate Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter, Member
State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
36 Saudi Arabia – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil Exporter,
Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
37 Senegal – Member of Islamic Conference
38 Sierra Leone – Member of Islamic Conference
39 Somalia – Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
40 Sudan – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference
41 Syria – Moderate Oil Producer , Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference
42 Tajikistan – Has been an Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
43 Tunisia – Small Oil Producer, Significant Hydrocarbon Exporter, Member State of Arab
League, Member of Islamic Conference
44 Turkey – Has been an Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
45 Turkish Cyprus – Observer at Islamic Conference
46 Turkmenistan – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member of Islamic
Conference
47 United Arab Emirates – Large Oil Producer, OPEC Member Country, Significant Oil
Exporter, Member State of Arab League, Member of Islamic Conference
48 Uzbekistan – Moderate Oil Producer, Member of Islamic Conference
49 Western Sahara -
50 Yemen – Moderate Oil Producer, Significant Oil Exporter, Member State of Arab League,
Member of Islamic Conference

The Muslims who came in from the Heat? - the 'Diaspora' in the West, India and other Asian (and African) minorities (and majorities)

The internal debates (among other things), as I've suggested in a recent post, have had the effect of producing refugees, migrants and exiles to most parts of the world over many decades. In the West, this 'Diaspora' has been viewed with some suspicion, particularly since 9/11. Nevertheless, as discussed, they are not the threat they may appear and in some cases they have lived in their new homes now for an extended period of time.

Turkish Cypriots mostly arrived from the 16^th to the 19^th Century, for example. Muslims in Albania, Kosovo, Greece, Bulgaria and Bosnia have for the most part lived there since Ottoman times and minorities exist in several other Balkan states.

In more recent times, a group of Muslim mainly economic refugees have arrived in the West (as citizens of former Western colonies). The countries most affected include France (mainly North Africans), the Netherlands (mainly Indonesians), Spain (mainly Moroccans), Italy (mainly North Africans) and the UK (mainly South Asians). There are also hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis in Norway, Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and other Muslim asylum-seekers in Germany and Muslims generally in Denmark.

Migrants to the US tend to be relatively well off before their migration when compared with the experience in many of these other countries.

Efforts have been made in countries of the West to study the experiences of these and other migrants and their children and grand children. Young people in this group (aged 10 and less) commonly lose the language of their parents relatively quickly as they replace it with the language of their host country unless special efforts are made to ensure they retain it. This often creates some difficulty with the older age group who tend to be slow to learn the new language.

Migrants tend to first assimilate into their new culture by adopting the local dress to some extent, the local language as much as possible and local food consumption patterns and preferences and local names to some extent. Integration tends to follow this superficial beginning as new migrants become more familiar with the local culture and this might be indicated by an interest in participation in local sports, for example.

The phenomenon of blocs of a particular nationality initially settling together in particular neighbourhoods has also been studied, as well as the tendency for migrants who attain a certain standard of living or level of 'novel acculturation' to eventually settle in new neighbourhoods in a fashion that is somewhat more integrated into the population as a whole.

The role of schools, clerics, community organisations and home governments is also studied. Interestingly, the secularist Turkish government plays a more significant role in the religious institutions of the Turkish diaspora including in Australia than any other Muslim government plays in the affairs of their diasporas.

Tariq Ramadan, a grand son of Muslim Brotherhood founder al-Banna and born in Switzerland, is an interesting example of integration by education of the son and grandson of a Muslim Brother. He has written on the role of Islamic reform in the position of Muslims in Europe and is usually considered a moderate Muslim. He has also been denied a visa to the US and is a controversial figure in both the West and the East.

India contains such a large minority of Muslims that there are more Indian Muslims there than there are Muslims in the entire Arab world. They have tended to be concentrated in specific areas in the largest numbers.

Minorities also exist in the south of the Philippines (called Moros (Moors) by the Spanish colonists - naturally all Muslims looked the same to them). Southern Thailand and West and North West China (virtually all throughout China there are actually significant numbers both urban and rural) also have large numbers of Muslims though they form a minority in the countries as a whole. All of these groups may be considered virtually indigenous to the regions they occupy today. There have been recent migrations, also, to Japan and Korea.

Ghana and several east African states, while they have contributed significantly to the European populations of Muslims, also continue to contain large minorities within their borders.

The dynamic experience of Muslims in the US (which is likely to be similar to the experiences in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and some South American countries) has been studied especially extensively and intensively. Most Muslims (besides the virtually indigenous African American Muslims, whose ancestors, many of whom were likely Muslims, arrived as slaves) arrived in a large surge in the last four decades and the new arrivals were mostly 'people of means' on arrival. Among them have been professionals and academics that have significantly influenced the US political class and intelligentsia as well as comparable groups in their home countries.

They tend to form part of the middle class and settle in cities. Modern Islamic organisations have formed in areas of concentration which also still have an influence in the originating countries some of which cooperate well with the US government. Many African Americans have converted (or possibly in some sense reconverted given their history referred to above) to Islam forming some separate organisations. There are also, of course, recent African arrivals that are also Muslim. Reprisals following 9/11 and consequently further alienation and disaffection of Muslims have produced a significant (and ongoing) cycle in the US.

The Australian experience has been that many Australians don’t understand that there is a difference between Islam (the religion) and Islamism (a variety of political doctrines with limited support among adherents to Islam). This has been played upon to some extent by ignorant or deliberately trouble-making opinion-makers for their own purposes. The result has been some disharmony in a community suspicious of “fifth columnists” representing “international terror” within a basically peaceful Australian Muslim community. The Muslim community leadership may also have played a role by appearing to pay no more than lip service to politically pluralist values with limited actual engagement and compromise with the rest of the community in civil society. The Turkish thinker, Fethullah Gülen, who now lives in the US, has paid special attention to what may be required on the part of Muslims here in Australia and taken practical steps.

On the other hand, in our northern neighbour, Indonesia, as well as in Central Asia, the uncompromising Hizb ut-Tahrir that originated in the Middle East and South Asia and promises a return to the formerly ‘unbroken’ Caliphate continues to have a significant following.

Pakistan, the 'Ulama on the 'Net and Averroes

In Pakistan, Islamist groups attempted several times to assassinate the then-president, Pervez Musharraf, suggesting that more violent disagreements exist there and, of course, Benazir Bhutto was recently murdered. Freedom of non-Muslim speech has been severely limited there. The situation there remains volatile and dangerous.

I would have written more on Pakistan as I mentioned I was going to write a Pakistan post but I haven't done sufficient research yet. Instead I will briefly comment on the state of Islam today, generally, as I see it and as it often appears to be expressed in places like Pakistan and on the internet.

There is arguably a certain lack of synthesis in Islamic scholarship as a whole that lends support to the irrationality and ahistoricism/atavism by which it is reasonably often marked; a certain inability or unwillingness to see the forest of principles for the trees of specific pronouncements. The proliferation of fatawa sites on the net attests to the kind of narrow interpretation from both the questioner and the giver of the fatwa/ruling that so often occurs in the hazy area for Islam of what constitutes Mubah behaviour – not specifically either not recommended, forbidden, recommended or obligatory. Averroes, on the other hand, was concerned to stress the importance of finding guiding principles. How far we have come since 12th century Spain and Marrakesh!

Muslims Today

The “Islamic World” is a bit more complicated still than the Middle East or the Arab world but it also exists in some sense as a relevant identity (and perhaps region) and it is worth considering what our ideas are before we begin to study a history. The Islamic World can be said to exist today both within and outside the Middle East. However, even Middle Eastern states tend to have a diversity of external orientations according to their geopolitical interests rather than the interest of either Arab or Islamic unity.

Islam is a form of theism and a system of other beliefs derived from the interpretation of and attempt to ‘live out’ the requirements of a set of scriptures. Early on, various Islamic thinkers also developed Islamic legal philosophy which remains important to Islam today and in politics. And it has a politics (and a culture or, more precisely, cultures but, note, many histories, too).

There have been two significant large ‘Islamic’ Empires covering large parts of the Middle East for extended periods: the 'Arab' Caliphate or Caliphates (including even parts of Western Europe for part of its life/their lives) from around 700 CE to around 1,300 CE and a Turkish Empire more recently (which included parts of Eastern but not Western Europe). You will notice that I need to use inverted commas often to hopefully make clear in the long run that any unified understanding of this history may risk oversimplification. Beyond the Middle East there have also been a variety of Islamic Empires and polities.

The Middle East (and beyond) experienced much variety in these Islamic histories but we should also note that most of the Islamic world was ruled in some form by capitalist European colonialists in the 19th and early 20th Centuries (towards the end of the period of the Turkish Ottoman Empire). And that the Islamic world also has exportable oil.

The Islamic World extends, as I've said, far beyond the Middle East. It extends to much of Africa, to Central Asia as far as China and Russia (and including parts of those states), to South East Asia and to various communities (both Arab and non-Arab and both Diaspora and indigenous) throughout the world including in Europe, Australia and the USA.

In some cases, even in minority communities there are huge numbers of Muslims. For example, there are around 200 million Muslims in Hindu India; roughly as many as there are in the entire Arab World. And what makes a Muslim? We need to consider the phenomenon of the ‘nominal’ Muslim as we do the nominal Christian. If we do, there may actually be many more ‘true’ Indian Muslims than there are ‘true’ Muslims in the Arab World.

There are several sub-regions that I will later find convenient to separate for the purposes of discussion of their regional Islamic histories, that have had both an Islamic and Arab influence for many centuries in West Asia and Africa. They are Arabia, the Near East of West Asia (including the 'Fertile Crescent'), Egypt, Nilotic Sudan, the Maghreb (North African states other than Egypt), Central Sudan and Western Sudan. These last two are both to the West of the modern state of Sudan.

This 'central' Islamic group of distinct zones circles and crosses the Sahara and abuts the Mediterranean and Arabia and the Ethiopic and Swahili regions of East Africa bordering the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

I will discuss the development of Islam in these regions in some depth in later posts.

Now let’s begin to concern ourselves with the whys and wherefores of the origins of the Islam we may fear. Islam had a setting that informs it as surely as any set of ideas and its environment engage in a dialogue to arrive at a final compatible mutual synthesis. For our purposes, let’s begin by considering (in the following posts) the nature of the Arabia that Islam came to infuse with itself and in turn be infused with.