The number of mosques has increased in the United States over the past decade, at an “incredible speed” (74 percent) and nothing indicates a strong acceptance of fundamentalism by young Muslims, according to a report Wednesday. According to the document entitled “Mosques in 2011”, there are 2,106 of them are within the 50 states and Washington D.C, showing a 74 percent increase in the number of mosques in comparison to 2000, the year before the attacks of September 11, when there were only 1,209 mosques.
In upstate New York there are 192 mosques, 120 are in South California, 166 in Texas, 118 in Florida and two in Montana, where less than one percent of the population is of a different religion than Christianity. “The number of mosques has increased over the last ten years with an incredible speed”, the report, made at the initiative of the group “Faith Communities Today”, justifying the increas by the arrival of new immigrants (from Somalia, Iraq, Africa, Bosnia) and the growing prosperity of the Muslim community.
This number is far more less than the Christian churches of about 322,000, according to an estimate of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. Most leaders of mosques – 87 percent – estimated in 2011 that fundamentalism has not increased among young people, on the contrary, “their main problem is to come and stay in the mosques”, the report says. A quarter of them believe that “American society is hostile to Islam”, far fewer than in 2000, when 50 percent had that view.
A majority of 99 percent believe that Muslims should be involved in American institutions and 91 percent say they should be involved in politics. “U.S. Muslim community is full of energy and is more and more a part of the U.S.”, said the author of the report, Ihsan Bagby. “American Muslims feel at home”, said Nihad Awad, official with the American-Islam Relations Council, “they believe in the American dream and trust their fellow citizens”.
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