Lausanne World Pulse – STRATEGY, TRENDS AND STATISTICS – Muslim Growth in the United Kingdom and Worldwide

By Peter Brierley

The growth of the Muslim community and the decline of church attendance in the United Kingdom seem of perpetual fascination to the media. When the BBC Sunday programme “Heaven and Earth” chose five key facts about religion in Britain to explore, one of them was: “When would Muslim mosque attendance overtake Christian churchgoing?” So what are the actual numbers behind all the interest?

Mosque Attendance
There is no up-to-date reliable information in the UK on how many Muslims actually attend mosque regularly. A comprehensive survey¹ was undertaken in 1986 which found that fifty-one percent of Muslims attended one of the main Muslim festivals, such as Idul-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. This is in contrast to the proportion of Christians attending church at Easter or Christmas, variously estimated at between fifteen percent and twenty percent of the population, respectively. This makes up only about twenty-five percent of Christians in the UK. This includes nominal Christians just as the Muslim percentage includes nominal Muslims.

The same survey found that Muslim Friday mosque attendance was sixteen percent which, again, is slightly more than double the percentage of Christians attending church on an average Sunday. A more recent BBC poll suggested the Muslim Friday mosque attendance figure has increased slightly. However, the same survey found that sixty-five percent of attendance was by children. This means that adult attendance is comparable to the adult proportion of Christian Sunday church attendance.

In the absence of other reliable information, the fifty-one percent result (conveniently rounded to fifty percent) is now regularly used to indicate annual attendance or what are sometimes called “active Muslims.” The number of Muslims in the UK is increasing, partly through immigration, partly because Muslims have larger families and partly through conversion (often at marriage). If present trends continue, the number of active Muslims will increase pro rata, rising from half the 2001 Census figure of 1.6 million to half the 2040 estimated number in the UK of 4.3 million (shown in Figure 1 below). The number of active Muslims will outnumber Christian church members by 2049 if nothing changes in the underlying trends.

 

Mosques
The number of registered mosques in the UK has increased substantially from four in 1960 to 314 in 1985 to 618 in 2002. Mosques, like churches, must be “registered” by the government central Registry Office if lawful marriages are to be solemnised in them. However, also like churches, there are many places of Muslim worship which are not registered. For example, in 2004, the Muslim website had a database of 1,550 mosques. The non-registered mosques, sometimes called “house-mosques,” are in prayer rooms, houses or elsewhere.

This would suggest an average weekly attendance of perhaps 180 people per mosque. Like churches, some are much larger and others much smaller. The London Central Mosque, the largest, has an attendance of five thousand people at festivals.

Dr. Peter Brierley is the Senior Lausanne Associate for Church Research. He attended Lausanne I in 1974 and has been involved with the Lausanne movement since 1984. Formerly a government statistician, he is currently executive director of Christian Research, a UK charity which produces resource volumes like Religious Trends and the UK Christian Handbook. Brierley can be reached at [email protected].