Islam in Czechia: history and Muslim population data

History of Islam in Czechia

The Czech Republic has an area of 78,867 sq km and its map is presented in Figure 4.5.2. It used to be united with Slovakia under the name of Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1993, when they split peacefully with the fall of Communism. It adopted the shorter name of Czechia in 2016. The presence of Muslims here remained negligible until the start of the twenty-first century. The 1880 Austrian census showed three Muslims in current Czech lands: two in the capital Prague and one in Litomerice, just north of Prague. So, three Muslims in Bohemia region and none in Moravia and Silesia regions, the latter is mostly in current Poland. The 1900 census recorded three distributed among the cities of Teplice, Žižkov and Brno. In 1910, the number of Muslims increased to seventeen.

The 1921 Czechoslovak census indicated the presence of 185 Muslims, who we assume lived in the capital Prague. As shown in Table 4.5.2 and according to census data, the number of Muslims increased from 495 or 0.01% in 1991, to 3,699 or 0.04% in 2001, to 3,358 or 0.06% in 2011 and 5,132 or 0.05% in 2021. In the 2021 census the religious affiliation was not collected from almost half of the population (4.66 million)!

Thus, assuming that the percentage of Muslims will continue to increase by 0.01 of a percentage point per decade; then the Muslim population is expected to remain around 0.1% of the total population throughout the second half of this century, increasing from to 8,000 by 2050 to 15,000 by 2100.

Historical Muslim population dataset for Czechia

The figures below are from the CoMPS historical dataset. Population values are expressed in thousands; 2100 is a modelled projection, not a present-day count.

For the full time series and visualisation, use the interactive map above.