A new report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are approximately 1.57 billion Muslims in the world — representing nearly one-quarter of the entire globe’s population.

The Pew report is fascinating in the number of unexpected facts researchers uncovered in three years of surveying.   For example:

• While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa;
• The Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries.
• Two-thirds of all Muslims live in 10 countries. Six are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey), three are in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco) and one is in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria);
• Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population (203 million, or 13 percent of the world’s total);
• Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States although they only make up 0.8 percent of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about 2 percent of the total population.

The Pew Forum plans a similar survey of Christianity beginning next year.

A pdf version of the report is available here.