Muslims

• 1. Introduction

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  Muslims number roughly 2 billion people today, making up about a quarter of every human being alive on earth. That figure is not static. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, driven by a younger average age and a fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman, well above the global average of 2.5. The word at the center of all this is deceptively simple. Muslim. It comes from the same Arabic root as Islam itself, the triliteral Š-L-M, meaning to be whole or intact. Who, then, counts as a Muslim? How did a faith rooted in seventh-century Arabia come to span Indonesia, Nigeria, and everything in between? And why did the English language spend most of the twentieth century spelling the word wrong? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Word and Its Weight

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  In 1991, the Associated Press instructed news outlets across the United States to stop writing "Moslem" and start writing "Muslim". The change was more than a style preference. Many Muslims in English-speaking countries had long objected to the older spelling because its "s" was frequently pronounced with a z sound, pulling the word toward the Arabic triliteral ẓ-l-m, a root carrying negative meanings and containing the Arabic word for "the oppressor". The last major newspaper in the United Kingdom to make the switch was the Daily Mail, which held on to "Moslem" until 2004.

  Alternate forms of the word have circulated for centuries. Mosalman, Mussulman, and Musulman remain standard terms in Central and South Asian languages, though in English they have become archaic. Earlier still, European writers through the mid-1960s commonly used "Mohammedans" or "Mahometans", terms Muslims have historically found offensive because they imply worship of the Prophet Muhammad rather than of God. In medieval Europe the standard word was Saracens. Each term carries the assumptions and blind spots of the era that coined it.

  The Muslim philologist Ibn al-Anbari cut through those layers with a precise theological statement: a Muslim, he wrote, is a person who has dedicated worship exclusively to God, in the same way that something in Arabic is described as salima to a person, meaning it became solely their own. Quranic studies scholar Mohsen Goudarzi has pushed that analysis further, arguing that in the Quran itself the word muslim carries the meaning of monotheist, not merely a follower of Muhammad's specific community.

• 3. Scripture and Submission

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  The Quran names Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus as Muslims, because they submitted to God, preached his message, and upheld his values, which the text describes as including prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. The verse Quran 3:52 records the disciples of Jesus telling him directly: "We believe in God; and you be our witness that we are Muslims." For Islamic theology, this is not a retroactive annexation of earlier figures. It reflects a view that Judaism and Christianity represent earlier iterations of the same submission to the one God of Abraham.

  Muslims hold the Quran to be the verbatim word of God as revealed to Muhammad, the final prophet. Alongside it, they accept prior revelations: the Tawrat, which corresponds to the Torah; the Zabur, associated with the Psalms; and the Injil, identified with the Gospel. These texts are regarded as authentic earlier expressions of divine guidance, even as Muslims believe the Quran supersedes and preserves them.

  Until roughly the eighth century, the word muslim itself had a broader application, describing anyone considered to be submitting to God, a category that could include Christians and Jews. The narrower, distinctly communal use of the term solidified over time, while mu'min, meaning believer, became the preferred word for those specifically inside the emerging Islamic tradition.

• 4. Entry into Faith

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  To become a Muslim requires speaking the Shahada in front of Muslim witnesses. The declaration is precise: "I testify that there is no god worthy of worship except Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." In Arabic: ašhadu ʾan-lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāhu wa ʾašhadu ʾanna muħammadan rasūlu-llāh. It is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the framework of practice that also includes daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting through Ramadan, and a pilgrimage to Makkah at least once in a lifetime.

  The precise form of the Shahada varies by denomination. In Sunni Islam it has two parts: the declaration that there is no god but Allah, and the declaration that Muhammad is his messenger. In Shia Islam a third phrase is added concerning Ali, the first Shia Imam, translating as "Ali is the wali of God." Quranists, who regard the Quran as the sole scriptural authority, recite only the first half of the Sunni formulation, arguing that naming Muhammad in the declaration of faith risks elevating him to a position alongside God.

  Most theological traditions in Islam hold that outward works alone do not determine whether someone is a Muslim. Only God, this reasoning runs, can fully know a person's inner belief. Among Ash'arite scholars, a recommended practice when asked about one's faith is to say the Istit̲h̲nāʾ, a phrase invoking God's will, because certainty about one's own spiritual state belongs to God alone. The sole major exception to this inward-looking standard came from the Khawārij, an early movement that based Muslim identity primarily on adherence to external legal and ritual norms.

• 5. Sunni, Shia, and Beyond

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  Between 87 and 90 percent of the world's Muslims are Sunni. The second largest denomination, Shia Islam, accounts for 10-13 percent. Beyond those two, movements including the Ahmadiyya, Quranism, and Ibadism together make up around 1 percent of the global Muslim population. A significant number of Muslims in the Middle East identify as non-denominational rather than aligning with either major tradition.

  The majority of Muslim theological schools agree that following the sunnah, the practices and teachings attributed to Muhammad as recorded in the hadith, sits alongside the Quran as a binding source of guidance. The weight given to hadith is one of the fault lines distinguishing denominations. Quranists, for example, reject hadith as a religious authority altogether, relying solely on the Quran. This puts the precise scope of the sunnah at the center of longstanding internal debates about what authentic Islamic practice looks like.

  Geographically, Sunni and Shia communities are concentrated in different regions. The Middle East holds the greatest concentration of Shia Muslims, particularly in Iran and Iraq, while the vast majority of Muslims in South and Southeast Asia follow Sunni traditions. That regional patterning has political as well as religious dimensions, shaping alliances and tensions across the Muslim world that continue to evolve.

• 6. Where Muslims Live

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  Indonesia holds more Muslims than any other country on earth, accounting for around 12.7 percent of the world's total. Pakistan follows with 11 percent, then Bangladesh at 9.2 percent, Nigeria at 5.3 percent, and Egypt at 4.9 percent. South Asia as a region accounts for the largest share of the global Muslim population, at 31 percent.

  India, which has no Muslim majority, nonetheless contains 10.9 percent of the world's Muslims, the largest Muslim-minority population of any country. After India, the next largest Muslim minorities are found in Ethiopia, China, Russia, and Tanzania. Sizeable communities also live in Europe, numbering around 44 million people, or roughly 6 percent of the European population. The Americas hold about 5.2 million Muslims, accounting for less than 1 percent of the population there, while Australia has approximately 714,000.

  As of 2010-49 countries had Muslim majorities. At that time, about 74 percent of the world's Muslims lived in majority-Muslim countries, with the remaining 26 percent in minority situations. By 2020, the Pew Research Center estimated that 79 percent lived in majority-Muslim countries. Muslims have faced persecution of varying intensity in China, India, parts of Africa, and Southeast Asia, a reality that shapes diaspora patterns and community organization far beyond the traditional Muslim heartlands.

• 7. Culture and Its Roots

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  The earliest Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate through the early Umayyad period, drew primarily from Arab, Byzantine, Persian, and Levantine traditions. As Arab Islamic empires expanded across continents, that cultural core absorbed and was shaped in turn by Indonesian, Bengali, Punjabi, Pashtun, Egyptian, Turkic, Malay, Somali, Berber, and many other traditions. The result is not a single monolithic culture but a vast constellation of practices and expressions that share a common theological orientation.

  One demographic feature stands out in data on Muslim communities globally. A 2016 Pew study found that 34 percent of the total Muslim population is under the age of 15, the highest proportion of any major religion. At the other end, only 7 percent of Muslims are 60 or older, the smallest share of any major religion. That youth-heavy profile directly explains the rapid population growth that makes Islam the fastest-growing religion in the world, and it also means the majority of Muslims alive today will shape the tradition's cultural expression well into the latter half of the twenty-first century.

  The same 2016 study found that Muslims, tied with Hindus, have the lowest average years of formal schooling among major religious groups, at 5.6 years. About 36 percent of Muslims have no formal schooling at all, and only 8 percent hold graduate or post-graduate degrees. Yet the study also noted that Muslims and Hindus have made the largest gains in educational attainment among major religions in recent decades, a shift whose full effects remain to be seen as those younger generations mature.