Islam in Netherlands: history and Muslim population data

History of Islam in Netherlands

The Kingdom of the Netherlands has an area of 41,543 sq km and its map is presented in Figure 4.3.7. The first Muslims in this country came from Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony under the name Dutch East Indies from 1800 to 1949. Censuses inquiring on religious affiliation were held regularly from 1879 until 1970. According to theses censuses, the percentage of Muslims remained at 0.00% until the second half of the twentieth century, increasing in number from double digits between 1879 and 1909, to triple digits between 1920 and 1947, then 1,400 or 0.01% in 1960 and 54,000 or 0.4% in 1970.

The evolution of first-generation population from Turkiye and Morocco from 1899 to 1991, which we use to estimate the Muslim population in The Netherlands. Accordingly, the Muslim population increased 0.12 million or 0.9% in 1976, to 0.22 million or 1.6% in 1981, to 0.27 million or 1.9% in 1986, to 0.36 million or 2.4% in 1991.

Thus, the Muslim population remained negligible until the 1960s, when tens of thousands of Turkish and Moroccan ‘guest workers’ arrived in The Netherlands to work in the country’s industrial sector.The number of Muslim increased further in the 1970s as more former Dutch colonies gained independence, including Indonesia and Suriname. The number continued to increase in the 1980s as the migrant workers were joined by their families. From the late 1980s, the number of Muslims also increased as a result of a growing influx of political refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and East Africa.

Since 1996, Statistics Netherlands provides data on the population with foreign background, which it defines as follows: “Characteristic showing with which country someone actually is closely related given their own country of birth and that of their parents. For someone with a first-generation foreign background the origin is indicated as the country of birth of that person. For someone with a second-generation foreign background the origin is indicated as the country of birth of the mother of that person. If the mother's country of birth is The Netherlands than the origin is indicated as the father's country of birth.” Statistics Netherlands also held religious survey (Permanent Quality of Life Survey or POLS) in 2006 that found the percentage of Muslims in those of foreign background as almost 100% for Pakistanis, Somalis, around 90% of Turks, Moroccans, around 80% of Afghanis, 60% of Egyptians, Iraqis, Tunisians, 40% of Iranians, 10% of Surinamese and 2% of Indonesians.

We assume that the largest ten populations of origin from Muslim-majority country are Muslim (except Indonesia) and use their numbers to estimate the number of Muslims in the Netherlands. The data and aggregation steps are shown in Table 4.3.7b, which also shows that descents of Turkiye and Morocco each constitute more than a third of the Muslim population in the Netherlands, but their combined share decreased from 85% in 1996 to 66% in 2021. Furthermore, about half of the Muslim population is second generation, versus a third before 1996. Accordingly, the Muslim population continued to increase to 0.6 million or 3.8% in 1996, to 0.8 million or 4.7% in 2001, to 0.9 million or 5.3% in 2006, to 1.0 million or 5.8% in 2011, to 1.1 million or 6.3% in 2016 and 1.3 million or 7.2% in 2021. According to EVS data, the percentage of Muslims increased from 1.05% in 1990, to 2.34% in 1999, to 1.86% in 2008, to 9.09% in 2017.

Thus, assuming that the percentage of Muslims will continue to increase by half of a percentage point per decade; then the Muslim population is expected to reach 1.4 million or 8% by 2050 and 1.7 million or 10.5% by 2100.

Historical Muslim population dataset for Netherlands

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.