Jan. 4: The number of Britons choosing to become Muslims has nearly doubled in the past decade, according to a study by an inter-faith think tank. The study by think tank Faith Matters attempts to estimate how many people have embraced Islam. Despite the often negative portrayal of Islam, thousands of Britons are adopting the religion every year, The Independent reported.
Estimating the number of converts living in Britain has always been difficult because census data does not differentiate between whether a religious person has adopted a new faith or was born into it. Previous estimates placed the number of Muslim converts at between 14,000 and 25,000.
But the new study by Faith Matters suggests the real figure could be as high as 100,000, with as many as 5,000 new conversions nationwide each year. The researchers used data from the Scottish 2001 census — which is the only survey to ask respondents what their religion was at birth as well as at the time of the survey.
The experts broke down what proportion of Muslim converts there were in Scotland and then extrapolated the figures for Britain as a whole. In all, they estimated there were 60,699 converts living in Britain in 2001. The researchers polled mosques in London to try to calculate how many conversions take place a year. The results gave a figure of 1,400 conversions in the capital in the past 12 months which, when extrapolated nationwide, would mean approximately 5,200 people adopting Islam every year.
Mr Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, said that coming up with a reliable estimate of the number of converts to Islam was notoriously difficult and added that this report is the best intellectual guestimate.