LONDON – Islam is the world’s fastest growing faith, a new research by US-based Pew Research Center has found, projecting the faith to become the largest in the world by 2070.

Currently, Islam is the world’s second largest religion, with roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in 2010. That’s roughly 23 per cent of the global population, the BBC reported.

According to Pew Research Center’s projections, Muslims’ number is expected to increase from 2010 to 2050 across the world by 73 per cent, followed by Christians, who are projected to grow by 35 per cent during the same time period, and Hindus at 34 per cent.

This indicates that Islam will surpass Christianity as the world’s biggest religion by the end of the century, the study projects.

This is because the Muslim population is growing faster than any major religious group. Muslims tend to have more children than members of other religious groups.

Around the world, each Muslim woman has an average of 3.1 children, compared with 2.3 for other religions combined.

Islam also has the youngest worshippers, the median age was 23 in 2010.