Source: The Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/getasciiarchive?script/2001/11/29/p11s2.txt

On November 29, 2001, The Christian Science Monitor featured an opinion piece "How many US Muslims? Our best estimate." Its authors, Howard Fienberg and Iain Murray, are analysts at the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonpartisan research organization. They detail methodological flaws with earlier studies, including ancestry studies citing 4 million Muslims, and the Mosque Study Project citing 6 to 7 million Muslims. The more recent figures offered by the Tom Smith and CUNY studies, 1.7 million and 1.8 million respectively, are seen as more reliable, "being drawn from wider, scientifically representative samples." The authors conclude, "While a precise figure remains elusive, '2 million Muslims, give or take a few hundred thousand' appears to be America's most accurate number - for now."