Canadian Muslim population to reach 6.5 per cent of population by 2030

Canada's Muslim community is expected to grow to 6.6 per cent of the population by the year 2030, compared to 2.8 per cent last year.

Meanwhile, a new report forecasts that the number of Muslims around the world will grow over the next 20 years at twice the rate of non-Muslims, but that the rapid growth will level off.

With more Muslim women getting educations and jobs, people migrating to cities, and living standards improving, the report says, the birthrate in majority-Muslim countries will come to more closely resemble the pattern in other nations.

Predictions that Europe will become a majority-Muslim “Eurabia” are unfounded, according to the report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group.

Muslims in Europe made up only 6 percent of the population in 2010, and will grow to 8 percent by 2030, the report says. In France and Belgium, Muslims will be about 10 percent of the population in 20 years, and in Britain, 8 percent.

Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.