Muslim population share, 1990–2050, on Pew’s high-migration path. Yellow diamonds mark sharia institutions from the year they were founded. Dashed rings mark the neighbourhood native-flight band (~18%). Click a country for regions, a region for city hubs, a city for a neighbourhood split — a tipping tessellation, not census tracts.
Turkey · Algeria · Morocco · Pakistan · Bosnia
Core stock is post-1960s guest workers (Turkey, Maghreb, Pakistan) plus Bosnian and Kosovar war refugees. Extra-EU Muslim inflows are still modest next to 2015.
Historical estimates and censuses
Country shares
Pew set · High migration · to 2050| Country | 1990 | 2016 | 2050 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cyprus heritage | 25.0% 343k | 25.4% 326k | 28.3% 331k |
| Bulgaria heritage | 12.0% 829k | 11.1% 718k | 11.6% 683k |
| France | 5.0% 3.01M | 8.8% 5.84M | 18.0% 13.1M |
| Greece heritage | 4.8% 539k | 5.7% 599k | 9.7% 928k |
| Netherlands | 3.8% 602k | 7.1% 1.24M | 15.2% 2.90M |
| Belgium | 3.2% 332k | 7.6% 870k | 18.2% 2.28M |
| Germany | 2.8% 2.06M | 6.1% 4.95M | 19.7% 17.5M |
| Slovenia | 2.4% 44k | 3.8% 77k | 5.2% 116k |
| Switzerland | 2.2% 172k | 6.1% 527k | 12.9% 1.22M |
| Austria | 2.0% 160k | 6.9% 609k | 19.9% 1.92M |
| United Kingdom | 1.8% 1.08M | 6.3% 4.17M | 17.2% 12.5M |
| Denmark | 1.5% 79k | 5.4% 314k | 16.0% 1.02M |
| Croatia heritage | 1.5% 62k | 1.6% 61k | 2.1% 73k |
| Sweden | 1.2% 111k | 8.1% 825k | 30.6% 3.41M |
| Norway | 1.2% 59k | 5.7% 310k | 17.0% 1.01M |
| Luxembourg | 1.0% 5.9k | 3.2% 21k | 9.9% 70k |
| Italy | 0.6% 311k | 4.8% 2.74M | 14.1% 8.80M |
| Spain | 0.4% 171k | 2.6% 1.23M | 7.2% 3.71M |
| Romania heritage | 0.3% 62k | 0.4% 77k | 0.9% 157k |
| Finland | 0.2% 9.9k | 2.7% 147k | 15.0% 890k |
| Ireland | 0.2% 9.3k | 1.4% 72k | 4.4% 247k |
| Portugal | 0.2% 18k | 0.4% 40k | 2.5% 276k |
| Estonia | 0.2% 2.4k | 0.2% 2.7k | 1.0% 15k |
| Malta | 0.1% 484 | 2.6% 14k | 16.2% 94k |
| Hungary | 0.1% 8.4k | 0.4% 37k | 4.5% 458k |
| Latvia | 0.1% 1.6k | 0.2% 3.6k | 0.4% 7.8k |
| Lithuania heritage | 0.1% 3.1k | 0.1% 2.9k | 0.2% 5.3k |
| Czechia | 0.1% 4.8k | 0.2% 21k | 1.2% 139k |
| Slovakia | 0.1% 2.4k | 0.1% 5.2k | 0.7% 40k |
| Poland | 0.1% 17k | 0.1% 36k | 0.2% 80k |
Headcounts = mapped share × a ~2025 national total, eased to 1990 and 2050. Order of magnitude, not a census.
When neighbourhoods tip
These bands are neighbourhood and borough densities, not national shares. A country at 6–8% routinely contains tracts well above 20%. Dashed rings on the map mark cities that have crossed the native-flight band at the city mean — which already implies many streets are past it.
- 13–18%Native flight / avoidance
Card, Mas and Rothstein (QJE 2008): US census-tract tipping 5–20% minority, mean ~13%. Böhlmark and Willén (AEJ 2020): in Swedish metros, native population growth drops discontinuously at ~17–18% non-Western. Aldén, Hammarstedt and Neuman (IMR 2015) find the same shape in Swedish municipalities (later papers in that line: 13–24%, average ~17%). Flight and avoidance both operate; better-off natives leave first. This is ethnicity and class, not a Muslim-only law of nature — but it is the best identified European threshold.
- 25–40%Sharia councils appear (UK, empirical)
Not a legal trigger. The Home Office 2018 review found 30–85 voluntary family councils in England and Wales, clustered in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Dewsbury — boroughs that sit at ~25–40% Muslim in Census 2021. First council: Islamic Sharia Council, Leyton, 1982, in an already-dense Bangladeshi enclave. They have no legal status; English law prevails. Solid yellow diamonds are documented councils (they appear on the timeline at the founding year). Hollow yellow diamonds are an estimate: the city has entered the UK cluster and no council is documented.
- 50%+Local majority ≠ municipal sharia
Ceuta and Melilla are 40–50% Muslim and remain under Spanish civil and criminal law. Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo have heritage majorities with state law, not imported sharia. The only EU official family-law sharia is Western Thrace (Lausanne 1923) — a treaty minority court, not a demographic threshold. No EU city has adopted sharia as municipal criminal code at any share observed.
City zoom applies that 18% rule cell by cell: neighbourhoods below it stay mixed; once they cross, remaining non-Muslims leave and the share jumps. The tessellation is labelled as a model, not a census. School-age shares run roughly double all-ages in recent-settlement cities (Pew age structure), so catchments cross the flight band years before the resident mean. ICM/Policy Exchange 2016: 43% of British Muslims supported “aspects” of sharia in the abstract (16% strongly); Channel 4 / ICM 2016: 23% wanted sharia in areas with large Muslim populations. Those are attitude polls, not the share at which a city “adopts” law.
How to read this
The animation is a choropleth of Muslim population share, not of political control, crime, or belief. Pew Research Center (2017) remains the only continent-wide projection with published country tables. It covers the then-EU plus Norway and Switzerland — about 4.9% Muslim in 2016, 7.4 / 11.2 / 14.0% in 2050 under zero / medium / high migration. The atlas follows that 1990–2050 window. It opens on the high path and plays through it once.
Hover origins. Country notes name the main source countries for that year — guest-worker stock, asylum peaks, family reunion — from Destatis, INSEE, ONS, Migrationsverket, STATEC, UNHCR, Eurostat and Pew’s 2010–16 migrant tables. Ukraine 2022 is labelled not Muslim where it dominates totals. After 2016, Pew does not publish origin-by-destination matrices; 2026–50 lines are the high-migration scenario, not a national forecast.
School-age is not a second census. It applies Pew’s age structure (27% of Muslims vs 15% of non-Muslims under 15) so a 15% all-ages city can already be ~35–40% of pupils. Circles are city hotspots; radius scales with share.
Yellow diamonds appear in the year a sharia institution was founded — not city criminal law. Western Thrace (Greece) is the only EU case of official sharia family courts, under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. UK diamonds are voluntary sharia councils (marriage, divorce, inheritance) sitting beside English law; the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (Nuneaton, 2007) uses the Arbitration Act 1996. Hollow diamonds are an estimate: the city’s scaled share has entered the ~25–40% band where UK councils actually sit, and no council is documented. No EU city has adopted sharia as municipal criminal code, including Ceuta and Melilla at 40–50%.
Dashed rings (~18%) mark the neighbourhood native-flight band from Böhlmark and Willén (Swedish metros, AEJ 2020) and the Card–Mas–Rothstein US tract range (mean ~13%). A city mean at 18% already implies many streets are past it. School-age shares cross the band earlier. See the threshold notes below the table.
2050 is Pew’s published horizon. No Western country in this set is majority-Muslim under any of Pew’s three 2050 scenarios. Sweden’s high path (30.6%) is the steepest; it assumes 2014–16 refugee-scale inflows continue, which Sweden’s post-2016 policy has not done.
Regions. Click a country to zoom. Subnational shares exist for the UK, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy. Other countries zoom to the national outline only. Regional figures are a snapshot, then scaled with the national 1990–2050 path. Heritage countries (Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Sandžak, Dobruja, Lipka Tatars) are Ottoman-era or older communities, not post-1960s settlement.
Neighbourhoods. City zoom is a Voronoi tessellation with a one-sided tipping rule at ~18%, then rescaled so the mean matches the city share. Named districts where the inner geography is well known; generated cells otherwise. It is a Schelling-style approximation, not census tracts.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population (2017); Pew Global Religious Landscape 2010–2020 (2025); Destatis / BAMF Germany; INSEE France; ONS Census 2021; Migrationsverket Sweden; Statistik Austria; Swiss FSO; STATEC Luxembourg; UNHCR Malta; UdSC Poland; UCIDE / CEU CEFAS Spain; Eurostat migr_imm1ctz; Home Office independent review of sharia law in England and Wales (2018); Card, Mas and Rothstein, QJE 2008; Böhlmark and Willén, AEJ: Applied 2020; Aldén, Hammarstedt and Neuman, IMR 2015. Headcounts use ~2025 national totals × the mapped share.