Azerbaijan: The road to Hajj

It is an ancient land at the crossroads of Europe and Central Asia and is said to have been the location of the Garden of Eden.

Different cultures and civilisations have met in Azerbaijan for thousands of years and the country was one of the first to embrace Islam when Arabian invaders imposed their religion on the region in the seventh century.

But when Azerbaijan fell under the control of the former Soviet Union in 1920, atheism became state policy; many Muslim leaders were exiled or killed and mosques were closed down or destroyed.

When the country regained its independence in 1991, many embarked on a journey to rediscover their faith and heritage and to fill the religious vacuum left by Communist rule.

Painful journey

Thirty-one-year-old Salamova Samira is a mother of two and part of the 95 per cent of Azerbaijanis who consider themselves Muslims. But, more significantly, she is one of only five per cent who actually practice their faith and is about to embark on the Hajj pilgrimage.

"I started praying when I was around 12 years old. There was only grandma [Samira's great-grandmother] who prayed in our family. She was 115 years old. She read the Quran," Samira says.

"When I was a schoolgirl, I also took lessons to learn the Quran. This was difficult then as many people viewed Islam in a bad light, unlike today."

The older generation, like Samira's mother, lived their lives without observing the central tenets of their religion and, more often than not, do not feel any need to start doing it now.

Samira will travel from Baku, the country's capital where she lives, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. But, for her, the road to Hajj has been a long one marked by pain and hardship.

"I had been praying until I turned 17. Then I got married and stopped praying. Having a family with children, I just could not find the time.

"My husband was a Muslim too. He was not against the fact that I prayed regularly. But I just could not do it. I have two daughters, aged 11 and 13 years old," she explains.

Her relationship with her husband soured and after five years of marriage they divorced.

"As the saying goes, when the world knocks you down on your knees, you are in the perfect position to pray," she says.

Performing the pilgrimage seemed like an impossible dream for Samira.

Although she earns a decent living as a house-keeping manager at a hotel, she knew it would take her years to save enough money to go on Hajj.

"Going to the Hajj was my dream. But with my salary, it was not possible. I always thought it would take a miracle for me to go," she says.

But fate was to intervene for Samira when a friend of her mother offered to sponsor her pilgrimage.

Islamic revival

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan has witnessed something of an Islamic revival; hundreds of new mosques have been built, old ones have been restored and new religious schools have been opened.

For many young Azerbaijanis, like Samira, an interest in Islam is re-emerging and stronger than ever.

"I can not describe my feelings, the first was fear. At the same time, I feel happy too," Samira says.

"After the Hajj, you would expect more of yourself. Before the Hajj, you can make some mistakes, but after the Hajj, you should be more careful in making your decisions.

"Everyone makes mistakes, commits sin, and lies. After the Hajj, you should not go back to your old ways. It is easy to go to the Hajj, but after that, it is as if you are born again, you become clean and innocent."

"And you should keep yourself that way. That is very hard. That is why I am afraid. But I will go and when I come back, I hope I can manage to do so."

1/4th of the world's population is now Muslim

Islam may be most closely associated with the Middle East, where it emerged in Arabia in the seventh century, but today the region is home to only one in five of the world's Muslims, according to a study of the religion's global distribution.

The world's Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly one in four people practise Islam, according to the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published the survey. This compares to 2.25 billion Christians.

The top five Muslim countries in the world include only one in the Middle East ‑ Egypt ‑ behind Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, in that order. Russia, the survey shows, has more Muslims than the populations of Libya and Jordan combined. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. China has a bigger Muslim population than Syria.

The work, the largest of its kind, was the result of three years of research examining data from 232 countries and territories.

The reality, as described by Mapping the Global Muslim Population, is that two out of three Muslims are Asians, while the 38 million Muslims in Europe, if treated as a separate group, would be the ninth largest in the world, behind Turkey, with a population of 71 million, and ahead of Algeria, with 34 million.

Pew Forum, in consultation with nearly 50 demographers and social scientists at universities and research centres around the world, analysed about 1,500 sources, including census reports, demographic studies and general population surveys, to arrive at their figures.

The research is the first step in projecting growth trends in the world's Muslim population, and a similar survey is planned by the Pew Forum on the distribution of Christians.

"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

"There are these countries that we don't think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizeable numbers of Muslims," said Alan Cooperman, associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China.

Islam had a huge geographic reach ‑ from the Atlantic coast to central Asia ‑ within a century of the prophet Muhammad's death, but until now its modern global profile was based on rough estimates.

The Pew Forum study depicts the world's second largest religion as complex and nuanced, challenging the notion that its trajectory is defined by a minority of Islamists.

Significantly, one in five of Muslims now lives in a country where they are represented as a religious minority, with three-quarters of that number concentrated in five countries: India (161 million), Ethiopia (28 million), China (22 million), Russia (16 million) and Tanzania (13 million).

The survey also attempted to quantify the relative sizes of the two main branches of Islam - Sunni and Shia - but came up against the difficulty that many national demographers did not distinguish between the two. It ended up suggesting that Shias, concentrated largely in four countries including Iran and Pakistan, probably made up between 10 and 13% of Muslims.

In summary:

• India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.
• China has more Muslims than Syria.
• Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.

• And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.

• Nearly two out of three of the world's Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

• The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world's Muslims, trail a very distant second.

• There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world
• One in five of the world's Muslims lives in a country where Muslims are a minority.
• Russia, Albania, Kosovo, those places -- Muslims are an indigenous population
• Roughly nine out of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, and about one in 10 is Shiite

• One in three of the world's Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.

You can see complete map of the Muslim World here.