Huffington Post reports: Americans and Europeans drastically overestimate their Muslim populations, a new international survey shows, a misperception many say is driven by Islamophobia and growing anti-Muslim sentiment.
Americans think 17 out of every 100 people in the U.S. are Muslim, according to the survey from Ipsos Mori, a U.K. research company. But, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, Muslims account for only 1 out of every 100 people in the U.S.
That works out to Americans thinking there are about 54 million Muslims in the U.S., when in fact the Muslim population is about 3 million.
This wide disparity between public perception and reality is even more pronounced in Europe. The French, for example, think Muslims make up 31 percent of the French population, when only 7.5 percent of that country is Muslim. [Continue reading…]
Actually, the U.S. ratio of actual to real is 17 to 1, whereas France’s ratio is more like 4 to 1. and no other European country is close to the U.S. over-estimate. So it is not at all clear what you mean when you say “This wide disparity between public perception and reality is even more pronounced in Europe.”
I think that the analysis of these statistics is based on the disparity between the perceived portion of the society versus the actual portion, relative to the total population. If you had a country in which 1% of the population was Muslim and the guessed size was 2%, that would be a 2:1 overestimation, yet the perception of a minuscule representation. If another country had 25% and the guess was 50% that would also be a 2:1 overestimation, so based on simply comparing the two ratios you could say both countries were the same in overestimating the size of the Muslim population. But I think that would be a misleading equivalence.
If the French typically believe that close to a third of the population is Muslim, there has to be a glaring disparity between their daily experience and their perceptions because if pressed on that estimate, I’m sure the people offering it would add a multitude of caveats such as, “but not where I work, nor in the school where I send my children, nor in my neighborhood.” This third of the population would be mysteriously mostly living their lives somewhere else.