All posts in Religion and Data Science

With the election season in full swing American Muslims have again come to the fore in the national debate, however discussions about American Muslims are rarely backed by quantitative data. Pew is the main source of most of the data which is available online. The average person on the street may not have enough time or resources to drill down into the data which is available about American Muslims so a more detailed analysis is was order. To address this need and inspired by Julia Silge’s analysis of religious adherents in America I have used data from Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) to analyze the spatial distribution of American Muslims. This analysis mainly focuses on demographics of American Muslims specifically where they live and pray. These numbers are from 2010 so there are likely to be some changes in demographics since then. As one of my previous analysis shows closer analysis of demographic data can reveal surprises which may be more readily spotted by a person with the relevant cultural background.

Lets start with the most obvious statistic (visualized in Map 1) i.e., what are the main areas in the US where American Muslims are concentrated. As one would expect American Muslims are concentrated in large metropolitan areas. Thus we see large concentrations of Muslims in the Northeast, California, Florida, in big cities in Texas and Chicago. There are also a few surprises like (relatively) large number of Muslims in New Mexico and Arizona.

Map 1: Distribution of American Muslims in the US (Click on the image for a larger version)

Now lets dig a bit deeper and look at the breakdown of Muslim population by state. The largest percentage of Muslims by State is concentrated in Michigan which has a large number of not just Arab Americans who are Muslims but also has the largest concentration of Christian Arabs in the US. One of the reasons that Berney Sanders won in Michigan partly because of the Muslim vote there. Many of these have been living there even before the wave of the Irish and Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, having migrated there from the time of the Ottoman Empire. The Upper Peninsula is bereft of any large concentrations of Muslims.

Map 2: Distribution Muslims in Michigan (Click on the image for a larger version)

After Michigan, the next four states with the largest number of Muslims are New York, California, Texas and Florida. In SoCal Orange county and the surrounding areas have the large number of Muslims, next up is the Bay Area where there are a large number of Muslims in the tech industry and lastly San Diego also has a decent Muslim community. Many non-Muslim Americans are surprised to learn that Texas has a large number of Muslims in places like Houston and Dallas. In fact Texas has more Pakistani-Americans than New York City , although they are more dispersed in Texas as compared to NYC. Speaking of which NYC and Long Island stand out in the New York state which is not surprising. Florida is somewhat surprising, Muslims are present all over the state and are especially concentrated in the metropolitan areas.

Map 3: Distribution of Muslims in 4 major US states (Click on the image for a larger version)

Now lets take a closer look at Muslims in California in the table below. The adherents column refers to the total number of adherents in the county and not the total number of people in the county. Los Angeles, Alameda and Yolo counties stand out in terms of absolute numbers and percentages. LA county has 59 mosques and no doubt there are many make shift congregations which are not likely represented in the data. LA has a quite diverse Muslim population, something that I experienced firsthand when I was invited for a talk by the Chinese American Museum to give a talk on Chinese American Muslims. It is somewhat surprising to see Mosques in places like Shasta county which does not have that many Muslims.

Statistics on Muslims in California by Counties

Now let us consider counties with more than 20,000 Muslims in the table below. Any Muslim person who has been to school at any metropolitan city in the US has run into folks from almost all of these counties. In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia county is the only one with substantial number of Muslims. Philadelphia has a large African American Muslim population. The Southern Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area has a large concentration of Muslims from almost all background, also being having the largest concentration of Afghans and Sudanis in the US.

In addition to the data from the ASARB and Pew there are other sources of data that one can use to learn different things about American Muslims. In general the American Muslim population can be roughly divided into three different ethnic groups of almost equal proportions i.e., 1/3 African American Muslims, 1/3 Arab American Muslims and 1/3 South Asian Muslims. That said, there are smaller concentrations of other ethnic groups as well e.g., Somali Muslims are primarily concentrated in Minneapolis, Cham Muslims from Cambodia in Seattle, Tatar Muslims from Poland in New York City, Chinese Muslims in the greater LA area, Senegalese Muslims in Harlem, Bosnian Muslims in St. Louis etc.

Now let us look at the frequency distribution graphs of mosques i.e., how many countries in the US has n number of mosques in the graph below. There are 2106 mosques which are represented in the data, out these 324 or 15% are the sole mosques in their respective counties. Another interesting thing to note from the graph is that there are at least 22 counties with 15 mosques or more. No doubt most of these overlap with the counties in Table 2.

Graph 1: Distribution of Mosques by counties in the US

If you have any questions regarding the demographics of American Muslims then you can ask them in the comments and I will try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

Update April 22, 2016: I have been getting requests about the distribution of Muslims in different counties throughout the US, mainly from people who want to know how many people live in their respective counties. To make things easier for them and other I am adding the following searchable table which has the distribution of Muslim for all the counties in the US.