Islam in Norway

A friend of mine recently commented on the situation in Norway.  When he heard about the bombing and shootings at first he thought that Muslims were responsible.  He said that in his opinion the concern of the right wing extremist who actually shot people was justified.  He had read somewhere that there were 500,000 Muslims in Norway out of a population of 4,500,000.  That would mean that one out of every nine people in Norway were Muslim.

A quick look at statistics on Norway reveals that this is inaccurate.  What we see is that as of 2009 there were163,000 people who either immigrated to Norway from predominantly Muslim countries or were children of those who did.  This ignores the fact that a higher proportion of non-Muslims might immigrate from these countries because they don't share the dominant religion.

Here is a table giving statistics on membership in religious or life stance communities in Norway outside of the Church of Norway.  500,000 is close to the figure for membership in all of these communities.  By far the largest group here were other Christian organizations.  Muslims make up 22% of this group, which would put them at roughly 2% of the population.

Since I did not have these statistics at hand when I was talking with him, all I could do was to point out that there were many people who had a vested interest in exaggerating the number of Muslims in Europe and that whenever I had looked into the matter I had always found the actual number of Muslims to be far more modest. I didn't know what the figures were for Norway, but I was able to tell him that 3% of the population of the European Union was Muslim and 5% of the Netherlands, which was one of the highest figures in countries of the European Union.