According to Dr. Ilyas Ba-Yunus , a Pakistani-born American Muslim and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Cortland, 75% of new Muslim converts in the US leave Islam within a few years. This perception was confirmed by Imam Abu Laith Luqman Ahmad, who wrote:

We are constantly being told that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States.

We are also being told that the Muslim population is anywhere from 2 million, to six million and that a third of them are converts.

That would put the number of converts from around 700,000 to 2,000,000.


However, I’m not sure if those numbers are accurate because many converts are leaving Islam, and or never even begin to practice Islam in any appreciable way other than take their shahaadah (declaration of conversion), and you don’t see anywhere near those numbers reflected in the nation’s masaajid [mosques].

Nor do you see too much evidence that people who became Muslim say, 20 years ago have stayed in the religion, raised their children upon it and started a second generation, or even third generation.


The overall estimates of the Muslim population may be accurate, but the stated percentage of converts does not seem reflected on the ground.

In almost every major city in America except for maybe Philadelphia and to a certain extent, Atlanta, you don’t see too many large communities of converts to Islam.

You see a lot of young people who are recent converts and that’s great but where are the thousands upon thousands of Muslims who we keep being told converted ten years ago? Twenty years ago? Thirty years ago? Where are their children, their grandchildren?


We need to re-evaluate the statistics that are being fed to us, because it has lolled many of us into a false sense of accomplishment to the point where we brag about how well Islam is doing amongst converts in America while in reality, it seems converts, by and large, are not faring that well and that the largest concentrations of Muslim men in America are those in our nation’s prisons.

When I used to volunteer at Folsom prison, there would be hundreds of male converts in attendance, and I have never seen hundreds of male converts at any Masjid anywhere in California.

2. Further evidence of converts leaving Islam comes from a London-based think tank. The British journal The New Statesman cites Usama Hasan, a part-time Imam and a senior researcher at the “counter extremism think-tank,” the Quilliam Foundation, as saying, “Many converts leave the faith. We don’t have exact statistics but some stats say 50 per cent will leave within a few years”.

According to Ahmed Nassef, the co-founder and editor in chief of MuslimWakeUp.com, fewer than 7 percent of American Muslims attend mosque regularly, compared with 38 percent of American Christians who attend church weekly.


Contrary to Islamic claims, the fastest growing belief groups in the United States are the non-religious., primarily Atheists and agnostics.