Of Europe’s 38 million Muslims, 920 000 live in Bulgaria – and most European Muslims live in Central and Eastern Europe, according to a report released on October 8 2009.
 
The report, entitled Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Muslim Population, was compiled by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life.
 
Bulgaria’s Muslims make up 12.2 per cent of the country’s population. Of the Muslims in Bulgaria, about 10 to 15 per cent are Shia, according to the report.
 
Muslims constitute about five per cent of Europe’s population. European Muslims make up slightly more than two per cent of the world’s Muslim population.
 
However, the report said that estimates of the numbers of Muslims in Europe vary widely because of the difficulty of counting new immigrants.
 
Nevertheless, it is clear that most European Muslims live in Eastern and Central Europe, the report said. The European countries with the highest concentration of Muslims are Kosovo (90 per cent), Albania (80 per cent), Bosnia-Herzegovina (40 per cent) and Macedonia (33 per cent).
 
The country with the largest Muslim population in Europe is Russia, with more than 16 million Muslims, meaning that more than four in 10 European Muslims live in Russia.
 
While most Muslims in Western Europe are relatively recent immigrants (or children of immigrants) from Turkey, North Africa or South Asia, most of those in Russia, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria belong to populations that are centuries old, meaning that more than six in 10 European Muslims are indigenous, the report said.
 
Greece is about three per cent Muslim, while Spain is about one per cent Muslim. Italy has one of the smallest populations of Muslims in Europe, with less than one per cent of its population being Muslim.

Germany is home to more than four million Muslims – almost as many as North and South America combined.

This means that Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon (between two million and three million) and more than any other country in Western Europe. This also puts Germany among the top 10 countries with the largest number of Muslims living as a minority population.

While France has a slightly higher percentage of Muslims than Germany, this study finds that it has slightly fewer Muslims overall.

The United Kingdom is home to fewer than two million Muslims, about three per cent of its total population.
 
The report, which describes itself as a "comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries" finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23 per cent of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.