By Diana Rojas.
In the year 2000, Islam had about 27, 239 followers in Brazil, according to the census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). In the census, the IBGE did not allocate a specific category to Islam, but instead included it in the category of “other religions”, a group which at the time included 51,000 Brazilians.
However, some Islamic institutions in Brazil therefore assumed that the number of Muslims in Brazil was in fact much higher. The Brazilian Islamic Federation maintains that there are today approximately 1.5 million Muslims in Brazil and estimates that there are about 50 mosques and 80 Islamic centres spread across the country.