One in four people is Muslim, says studyWorld Muslim population estimated to be 1.57 billionguardian.co.uk A woman carries a child on her shoulders as Muslims pray to celebrate Eid al-Adha in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photograph: Supri/Reuters Islam may be most closely associated with the Middle East, where it emerged in Arabia in the seventh century, but today the region is home to only one in five of the world's Muslims, according to a study of the religion's global distribution.The world's Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly one in four people practise Islam, according to the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published the survey. This compares to 2.25 billion Christians.The top five Muslim countries in the world include only one in the Middle East ‑ Egypt ‑ behind Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, in that order. Russia, the survey shows, has more Muslims than the populations of Libya and Jordan combined. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. China has a bigger Muslim population than Syria.The work, the largest of its kind, was the result of three years of research examining data from 232 countries and territories.The portrait it provides of Islam's distribution could have a profound influence on public policy in the west, and on attempts by the US, British and other governments to reach out to Muslims.Extrapolating the figures from the survey, the Islam that is largely practised around the world, particularly in large swaths of Asia, is more moderate and integrated than its stereotypical characterisation as an often militant and intolerant faith.The reality, as described by Mapping the Global Muslim Population, is that two out of three Muslims are Asians, while the 38 million Muslims in Europe, if treated as a separate group, would be the ninth largest in the world, behind Turkey, with a population of 71 million, and ahead of Algeria, with 34 million.Pew Forum, in consultation with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists at universities and research centres around the world, analysed about 1,500 sources, including census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, to arrive at their figures.The research is the first step in projecting growth trends in the world's Muslim population, and a similar survey is planned by the Pew Forum on the distribution of Christians."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."There are these countries that we don't think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizeable numbers of Muslims," said Alan Cooperman, associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China.Islam had a huge geographic reach ‑ from the Atlantic coast to central Asia ‑ within a century of the prophet Muhammad's death, but until now its modern global profile was based on rough estimates.The Pew Forum study depicts the world's second largest religion as complex and nuanced, challenging the…

  The 9/11 accusedMark Tran guardian.co.uk, Article historyKhalid Sheikh Mohammed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Photograph: AP Mohammed is a Pakistani raised in Kuwait but educated in America. The US administration claims he masterminded the 11 September 2001 attacks. He was subjected to waterboarding 183 times and confessed to roles in 30 plots other than 9/11, including planned attacks on Big Ben and Heathrow airport and the beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, according to transcripts at Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed was believed to be al-Qaida's third most senior member when he was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. Ramzi bin al-Shibh Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Photograph: AP Shibh is a Yemeni national who at one stage lived with the 11 September ringleader, Mohammed Atta. Allegedly the main intermediary between the hijackers and al-Qaida leaders, Shibh has been described by officials as a "key facilitator". In an interview with an al-Jazeera reporter in 2002 he showed souvenirs of the 9/11 planning, including a flight instruction book signed by Atta. He allegedly helped find flight schools for the 9/11 hijackers and sent them $120,000 for expenses and flight training. He allegedly was selected to be a hijacker and made a "martyr video" in preparation for the operation but was unable to get a US visa. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait. He is believed to have been a lead operative for a foiled plot to crash aircraft into Heathrow airport. Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, is a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a cousin of the jailed 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Youssef. He stands accused of being Mohammed's 9/11 lieutenant. US intelligence officials allege Ali delivered funds to the 9/11 hijackers and later helped Mohammed communicate with Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who is serving a life sentence in a US jail for his plot to kill 198 people on a transatlantic flight in 2001. Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi Allegedly Ali's assistant, he has also been accused of being an al-Qaida paymaster. Financial links have been found between Hawsawi, other terror suspects and some of the 9/11 hijackers, US intelligence says. It is claimed he helped arrange travel for some of them. He testified in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted for taking part in the 11 September plot, saying he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early 2001, but was never introduced to him and did not conduct operations with him. Walid bin Attash Walid bin Attash. Photograph: AP Attash, also known as Khallad, is a Yemeni raised in Saudi Arabia. He was allegedly selected as one of the hijackers, but was prevented from taking part when he was briefly arrested in Yemen earlier in 2001. He is said to…

  It's a wonderful, mixed-up world There are now more mixed-race children than ever before - and that is something for us all to celebate, says the scientist Aarathi Prasad. Aarathi Prasad
Published: 7:00AM GMT 01 Nov 2009Comments 53 | Comment on this articleAarathi Prasad and her 8 yr old daughter Tara with partner Robin. Photo: Philip Hollis Just two weeks ago in Louisiana, an American Justice of the Peace made international news for refusing to issue marriage licences to couples who were not of the same race. He said he had taken the decision because he believed that mixed-race children would not be accepted by their parents' communities. Whether this was genuine concern for a real social problem or was born of a more atavistic notion that there is something inherently, biologically wrong with mixing races, we can only speculate. Either way, his position was quite illegal, and his conduct is being challenged. The sentiment, however, is one that is also shared much closer to home. Nick Griffin, the chairman of the BNP and a member of the European Parliament, has made his party's stance on mixed-race children clear. Miscegenation, he says, is "essentially unnatural and destructive", and mixed-race children "are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism". The BNP says that it does not, nor will it ever, "accept miscegenation as moral or normal". As a person from the Indian ethnic minority in this country, I am sorry to say that I am familiar with this attitude. The most recent census in England and Wales found that people from my South Asian background were the least likely
of the minorities to be married to someone from a different ethnic group. Our relatively low inter-marriage rate might be explained by our cultural as well as racial differences, and our predilection for holding tightly to our caste systems and religions. When someone like me chooses a partner of another race, some family member is guaranteed to ask the same question as that Louisiana Justice of the Peace: "But what will the children be?" I can answer that question now. The answer is that my daughter, and approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race. Families like mine are on the rise – nearly one in 10 British children now lives in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was a child. In fact, mixed race people are the fastest-growing minority in this country, a trend that is set to continue. Even in my community, traditionally inward-looking when it comes to choosing partners, the proportion of mixed marriages has increased from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the space of just 14 years. A report in January 2009 produced for the Equality and Human Rights Commission noted that this rise in interracial relationships can be "taken to be a thermometer of ethnic relations". If that is the case, then majority and minorities seem…

    Obama's message called 'incoherent'President Obama's comments on a plan to build an Islamic center near ground zero reveal a messaging problem from the White House, a communications expert said. FULL STORY   

 Airline bombing plot: Obama rules out sackings over security failures• President takes blame, but other states pass buck
• MI5 denies Abdulmutallab recruited by al-Qaida in UKEwen MacAskill in Washington, Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 January 2010 20.41 GMT Article history  A street vendor with a picture of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Barack Obama in Sana’a. Yemen, Britain and Nigeria are blaming each other over the bomb plot. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA  Barack Obama ruled out any sackings over the failed Christmas Day plot today despite a catalogue of intelligence failures that could have prevented the alleged al-Qaida bomber from boarding the plane.As the row gathered momentum, a White House official said the president would resist pressure to dismiss people and would take personal responsibility, arguing that as commander-in-chief the buck stopped with him.The official spoke ahead of the release of an unclassified White House report that detailed the series of mistakes by the CIA, the state department, the national counter-terrorism centre and a host of other agencies which failed to spot the potential threat.Yemen, Britain and Nigeria were meanwhile engaged in a furious bout of buck-passing over their roles in the bomb plot.Yemen's deputy prime minster and security supremo, Rashad al-Alimi, sought to deflect criticism by insisting that the accused man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was recruited and radicalised in London – an assessment flatly rejected by the British security service MI5.Alimi also claimed that Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian student who flew from Ghana to Nigeria and then on to the Netherlands and the US, had obtained the explosives in Nigeria, not Yemen.Abdulmutallab spent months in Yemen where US officials say he met al-Qaida operatives. He is due to appear in court in Detroit for the first time on charges of attempting to bomb a US plane.Obama's decision not to make scapegoats of one or two heads of the dozen US agencies involved is partly politically-driven. Giving into Republican or media pressure by making sackings would add to the sense of political crisis.The White House national security adviser, James Jones, told USA Today that Americans would feel "a certain shock" about the missed clues that could have prevented Abdulmutallab from boarding the plane in Amsterdam. He said Obama was alarmed by the findings. "That's two strikes," Jones said, referring to the plane bomb plot and the shooting at Fort Hood late last year. Obama "certainly doesn't want that third strike".Abdulmutallab's father in Nigeria alerted the CIA to concerns about his son, and there were other warnings that were not acted on. Officials from the department of homeland security admitted yesterday that they also became concerned about Abdulmutallab, but only when he was already in the air en route to Detroit.The Yemen move to shift blame elsewhere comes after reports that the US planned to seek retribution…