Islam in Sweden

Among Muslim residents of Sweden, as of 2014, 110,000 are registered as member of, or regularly served by, a Muslim faith community. Out of the roughly 500,000 Swedish residents with roots in countries and areas dominated by Muslims, approximately one third practice Islam to some extent. Others are cultural Muslims, apostates or converts to other religions. Other sources set the figure at around 6% (almost 600,000) of the total Swedish population.

The first registered Muslim groups in Sweden were Finnish Tatars who emigrated from Finland and Estonia in the 1940s. Islam began to have a noticeable presence in Sweden with immigration from the Middle East beginning in the 1970s.

Most Muslims in Sweden are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The majority are from the Middle East, in particular Iraq and Iran. However, 5 out of 6 Iranians in Sweden consider themselves secular rather than Muslim and are in strong opposition to the Islamic Republic regime in their ancestral home. Most Iranians and Iraqis fled as refugees to Sweden during the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. The second-largest Muslim group consists of immigrants or refugees from former Yugoslavia, most of them are Bosniaks, who number 12,000. There is also a sizeable community of Somalis, who numbered 40,165 in 2011.

Sweden has a number of mosques providing the Muslim communities in Sweden places of worship. The first mosque in Sweden was the Nasir Mosque, built in 1976. It was followed by the Malmö Mosque, 1984, and later, the Uppsala Mosque in 1995. More mosques were built during the 2000s, including the (2000), the Umeå Mosque (2006) and the Fittja Mosque (completed 2007), among others. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya have financially supported the constructions of some of the largest Mosques in Sweden.

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