Islam by country · Americas
Islam in Saint Martin: history and Muslim population data
Explore CoMPS research on the historical journey of Islam in Saint Martin, alongside population data and an interactive timeline.
Open Saint Martin in the interactive map
History of Islam in Saint Martin
The Island on which it is located was divided between France and the Netherlands in 1648. Whereby, the French north occupying 57% of the Island was named Saint Martin, while the southern 43% part was named Sint Maarten. It seceded from Guadeloupe in 2007 and remains an overseas collectivity of France and has an area of 54 sq km.
The French government does not keep record of religion in any of its censuses. Thus, as an estimate, we can apply the same percentage of Muslims in Sint Maarten, which has a similar population size and culture, to estimate the Muslim population in Saint Martin. Hence, Muslims arrived here in the 1980s. They increased from none in 1982 and before, to 77 or 0.3% in 1990, to 294 or 1.0% in 1999 and 400 or 1.1% in 2008. The data is summarized in Table 5.3.7. Thus, assuming that the number of Muslims will increase by one tenth of a percentage point per decade, then the Muslim population is expected to remain less than one thousand throughout this century, reaching 2% of the total population by 2100.
Historical Muslim population dataset for Saint Martin
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.
| Year | Total population (thousands) | Muslim population (thousands) | Muslim share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 3.60 | 0.000 | 0.00% |
| 2000 | 29.22 | 0.295 | 1.01% |
| 2100 | 34.49 | 0.690 | 2.00% |
For the full time series and visualisation, use the interactive map above.