CAIRO – A new estimate published by Pew Research Center on Wednesday, January 6, put Muslims’ number in the US at 3.3 million, about 1% of the population, expecting the number to double by 2050.

“Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 3.3 million Muslims of all ages living in the United States in 2015,” Pew said in a report published on Wednesday.

“This means that Muslims made up about 1% of the total US population (about 322 million people in 2015), and we estimate that that share will double by 2050.”

The new research estimates that Muslims will outrank Jews before 2040 as the biggest religious group in the US after Christians.

Yet, the total size of the population will remain relatively small, doubling to about 2.1 percent by 2.1, a rise from 1% in 2015.

Meanwhile, the Jewish population is expected to shrink from 1.8 percent to 1.4 percent within the same period of time.

Pew figures that about half of the Muslim population growth will be because of immigration.

The other half is due to a “natural increase,” as Pew puts it: “American Muslims tend to have more children than Americans of other religious faiths. Muslims also tend to be younger than the general public, so a larger share of Muslims will soon be at the point in their lives when people begin having children.”