ESTIMATING THE MUSLIM AMERICAN POPULATION 37
Likewise, African American Muslims, who were concentrated mainly in
large cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, have more recently
fanned out to relatively smaller places like Peoria, Illinois; York, Pennsylva-
nia; Ponca City, Oklahoma; Joplin, Missouri; Tustin, California; and Gary,
Indiana, just to name a few. They have established there own mosques either
in cooperation with or in addition to other mosques or Islamic centers in their
respective cities or towns.
HOW MANY AND WHERE?
In our estimation in this project, there are 5,745,100 Muslim men and
women of all ages living in the United States today. Of these, only 3,953,651
or about 69 percent were born as well as naturalized citizens. Of the rest, a
total of 1,321, 011 or 23 percent were legal immigrants. Of the rest, there were
foreign students as well as those on professional and business visas. Their
numbers were derived mainly from, as mentioned earlier, the mailing lists of
various Islamic centers, neighborhood Masajid or mosques, the Musallas, full-
time schools, and various MSAs. We were able to locate a total of 1,751
Islamic institutions. However, because of nonavailability or disarray with
respect to mailing lists, we were able to use information only from 1,510 or 87
percent of them. Of these, 801 (53 percent) were Islamic centers; 194 (13 per-
cent) were neighborhood Masajid or mosques; 101 (7 percent) were Musallas;
199 (13 percent) were full-time schools, and 215 (14 percent) were MSAs. Of
these 437 or 29 percent were run by the people of Arab background, 392 or
almost 26 percent were run mainly by the African American Muslims, and 379
or about 25 percent were administered by the South Asian Muslims. The
mosques or Musallas run by the MSAs were comprised of 187,015 college
students (including foreign students) constitute a little higher than 3 percent of
the total Muslim population. They were typically multiethnic. The Turks, the
Bosnians, the Malaysians, and the Somalis, among others, ran the rest of the
institutions.
Overall, there was an overlap of 14,487 names that we took care of. Most of
this overlap was detected in the listings of the Musallas where people mostly
go for the Juma , or the Friday congregation only. The total number of house-
holds attached with all Islamic institutions in this study was 1,149,100 yielding
an average of close to 766 households per institution.
Further, our informants collected data from a total of 2,852 households
picked randomly from the correspondence lists. From these, we randomly
picked a subsample of one thousand households. Our computations show that
the average size of Muslim households attached with these institutions is a lit-
tle more then five.
The distribution of the Muslim population in the United States is far from
being uniform. We found that 774 or slightly more than 50 percent of the insti-
tutions of Islamic worship comprising almost 3 million Muslims live only in
eleven states (see table 1), with an average of about 260,000 Muslims in each