"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
Many Arab countries are rather sparsely populated: the biggest being Egypt, with 81 million, followed by Morocco and Algeria with 35 million.
Population wise, Islam's center of gravity is squarely in Asia, with Indonesia having 240 million people and the Philippines having a sizable Muslim minority.
Another frequent phantasm under our latitudes: "they're breeding like rabbits". Actually, countries like Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria or Iran have a fertility rate well under 2 children per woman, and, in the words of historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd, are more under threat from de-islamization... Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
