In the Trenches: "Nearly Seven Million"?

In his important and much-anticipated Cairo speech, President Obama said that there were "nearly seven million American Muslims." Two days earlier, in an interview in Washington, he noted that "[I]f you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

Clearly, the president was seeking to narrow the space between his intended audience and the United States. In principle, that's commendable.

The problem is that the facts don't bear out his assertions on this particular issue. Why or how the number "nearly seven million" made it into the speech is unknown to me, but the widely accepted figure is actually less than half that.

Does it matter? In the real world, yes, numbers have consequences - not just demographic, but electoral and political. And I come from an American Jewish community that is not only obsessed with counting itself, but also counter-intuitively attacks any researcher who might, heaven forbid, offer good news by suggesting that the Jewish population is larger than we thought. As a result, the practice of seemingly inventing numbers just strikes me as odd.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece in the Jerusalem Post entitled "US Muslim Population Figures: Fact and Fiction." Since then, to the best of my knowledge, no new data has become available.

Given the President's comment, which has been widely circulated, I've republished an abridged version of that 2007 piece below.

Unfortunately, as you'll see, my worst fears at the time were realized.

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On May 22, 2007, the respected Pew Research Center issued the results from "the first-ever, nationwide, random sample survey of Muslim Americans." Among the study's striking findings: the US Muslim population was estimated at 2.35 million.

No doubt, to some this estimate comes as a shock.

For years, absent census data on religious affiliation, the figure has been the source of speculation and, yes, brazen manipulation. Knowingly or not, many government officials, scholars and media outlets, have bandied about as articles of faith exaggerated numbers of American Muslims.

Here are just a few examples:

In April 2001, a project involving the Hartford Institute for Religious Research and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) led to the publication of The Mosque in America: A National Portrait. The lead researcher, Ihsan Bagby, a professor of international relations at Shaw University and a CAIR board member, reportedly had no training as a demographer. That didn't stop him from presenting his "guesstimation" of 6-7 million Muslims in the United States.

In the September/October 2003 issue of Islamic Horizons, published in the US, Ilyas Ba-Yunus, a demographer at the State University of New York at Cortland, declared that "there are close to 10 million North American Muslims." In 1997, in a publication for the East-West University, he had estimated the number at 6.7 million.

An August 27, 2006 article in the Washington Post on American Muslim assimilation stated that there are "approximately 6 million Muslims in the United States."

On January 17, 2007, Investor's Business Daily addressed the demographic issue in an article entitled The 8-million Muslim Lie. It cited a spokeswoman for the Muslim Advancement Society boasting on CNN that "there are 8 million Muslims in America now" and a Muslim chaplain in the Marine Corps asserting that "today, 8 to 10 million Muslims live in the United States." Then, in a rare instance of media courage, it challenged these claims as "wildly inflated" and astutely added that "politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure."

Will the Pew estimate of 2.35 million now take hold? Don't hold your breath.

In the late 1990s, AJC began approaching several mainstream media outlets to ask why they routinely cited numbers that appeared grossly exaggerated, often came from groups with dubious political agendas, and surely couldn't withstand closer scrutiny.

Most answers fell into one of three categories: (i) lazy journalism; (ii) fear of risking a confrontation with Muslim groups; or (iii) an inquiry from a Jewish group, no matter how the issue was framed, was deemed dead on arrival.

Bottom line: we had zero impact.

In 2001, we went the next step, knowing full well that, as a Jewish organization and notwithstanding our longstanding reputation for solid research, we'd be potentially vulnerable to attack. But no other institution stepped forward, so we forged ahead.

We approached an academic heavyweight, Dr. Tom W. Smith, the director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, whose scholarly integrity and impartiality were beyond dispute. He was asked to examine the available literature on the US Muslim population.

In October 2001, he reported his findings: "Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the media have used estimates of the Muslim population in the United States of 5-8 million, with an average of 6.7 million or 2.4 percent of the population." In the previous five years, 1996-2001, he looked at 20 estimates and they averaged out to 5.65 million.

After thoroughly studying all available data and the methodologies used, Dr. Smith concluded: "The best, adjusted, survey-based estimates put the adult Muslim population in 2000 at 0.67 percent, or 1,401,000, and the total Muslim population at 1,886,000. Even if high-side estimates based on local surveys, figures from mosques, and ancestry and immigration statistics are given more weight than survey-based numbers, it is hard to accept estimates that Muslims constitute more than 1 percent of the population (2,090,000 adults or 2,814,000 total)."

Unbeknownst to AJC at the time, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) was completing its 2001 omnibus American Religious Identification Survey. The results were strikingly similar to those of Dr. Smith. The survey found 1,104,000 adult Muslims in the US. Allowing for undercounting or sampling error, the survey suggested that the uppermost range would be 2.2 million to just under 3 million.

The studies were widely reported on at the time, including major stories by the New York Times and Washington Post.

The assault from those invested in the higher numbers was immediate.

The American Muslim Council accused Smith of trying to "deny the existence of four-and-a-half million American Muslims" and "tearing at the heart of America," while claiming that its own figure of 7 million Muslims emerged from the most recent US Census - an impossibility since the Census does not ask about religious affiliation. Meanwhile, CAIR described the Smith study as a "desperate attempt to discount the role of American Muslims." Its spokesman went on to declare, "Very often the representatives of the extremist wing of the pro-Israel lobby, such as the American Jewish Committee, seek to block Muslim political participation."

The AJC-sponsored and CUNY studies couldn't easily be attacked on scientific grounds. That didn't stop others, though, from continuing to repeat the outlandishly exaggerated numbers ad nauseum, or wielding the "Islamophobia" charge against anyone who dared use the reports' figures.

To a large degree, those twin strategies worked. Look again at the examples cited above from 2002 onward, after the studies appeared.

Now a third study has been released. Pew has a well-earned reputation for quality research. Will its findings change things?

What will the New York Times, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System, elected officials, and scholars, among others, say the next time they're in need of US Muslim population numbers?

Will they now cite the three authoritative and convergent studies on the subject? Or the exaggerated and politically-motivated numbers afloat out there? Or simply split the difference, convincing themselves that this is the "fairest" approach?

Stay tuned.