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Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > CAIR Overestimates Number of American Muslims by 400%

CAIR Overestimates Number of American Muslims by 400%

January 20, 2007

CAIR Overestimates Number Of American Muslims By 400%

January 19, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR] a Saudi funded Wahhabist lobbying group has once again been called to task on its wildly inflated estimate of the number of American Muslims.

From a January 17 piece in Investor's Business Daily "The 8-Million Muslim Lie"

'There are 8 million Muslims in America now," boasted a spokeswoman for something called the Muslim Advancement Society. She appeared on CNN to talk about what a proud day it was for her and other Muslim-Americans to see a Muslim brother sworn into Congress for the first time. But it's a wildly inflated estimate manufactured by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, something that the media could easily refute if they dared - simply by deconstructing CAIR's unscientific methodology."

It is easy to understand why CAIR and other Islamists have worked to create the myth that the Muslim constituency in America is large and growing. It swells CAIR's power and cows American politicians and the media.

The group's methodology has actually been under attack since the figures first surfaced in a CAIR funded "survey" designed by Ishan Bagby, not coincidentally a CAIR board member and a defender of Siraj Wahhaj also a CAIR board member who was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman 1993 World Trade Center bombing by US Prosecutor Mary Jo White.

Bagby is a professor of International Relations at Shaw University, located in Raleigh, N.C. He is not a demographer as his methodology will attest.

Bagby's method of assessing the number of American Muslims involved calling about a third of the nation's mosques and asking the imams to guess-timate how many people were in their congregations. He arrived at an average, then multiplied that number by the total number of mosques estimated to exist in the U.S. Finally Bagby multiplied that sub-total by a factor - 3 - which was seemingly plucked out of the air, to arrive at a total of 6 million which in the ensuing years via further statistical manipulation has grown to be 8 million, a sublimely ludicrous conclusion.

Investor's Business Daily noted that Bagby's survey relied on information provided by two imams who "claimed 50,000" members when it has been established that the country's largest mosque – DC's Dar al-Hijrah – has only roughly 3,000.

Disputation of CAIR's agenda driven demographic claims is not new however

In an October 22, 2001 AP, Rachel Zoll wrote:

"The American Jewish Committee, concerned by the growing political influence of U.S. Muslims, released a report Monday saying commonly used estimates of the Muslim population in this country are too high, likely by millions. The study concludes that the best estimate of Muslims in the United States is 2.8 million at most, compared to the 6 million figure used by many researchers and Muslim organizations."

Dr. Daniel Pipes wrote on October 29, 2001 in the New York Post:

"The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 carried out by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York polled more than 50,000 people and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million."

The truth is that the number of American Muslims hovers near 2 million, far less than one percent of the population.

Though the status of American Muslims, as an almost infinitesimal minority should by no means be used as justification for discrimination against law abiding Muslims, in a larger sense it serves to provide further evidence that CAIR is simply an agendized Islamist pressure group whose statistical butchery in this case underlines their basic disrespect for the American process in general and lack of veracity in most matters.

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