Muslim sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Muslim site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — mosques and the grounds they stand in, but also Muslim cemeteries, madrasas and Islamic schools, prayer rooms, offices and community buildings. Just over 338,000 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the kind of site it is, and its denomination where that was recorded. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The most important thing on this page

Nigeria has 690 mapped Muslim sites. Germany has 1,816.

Nigeria has on the order of a hundred million Muslims. Germany has about five million. Pakistan, with some 240 million people, has 9,241 sites — fewer than Turkey's 55,390 for a sixth of the population.

This map does not merely understate parts of the world. On this layer it inverts the picture, and that is not a caveat to read past — it is the single most important thing to know before looking at anything else here. What you are seeing is where OpenStreetMap has active contributors.

Where the map is right:

Indonesia (23.7%) and Turkey (16.7%) being the top two is real. They hold two of the densest mosque counts anywhere.
The magnitudes are still mapping rather than reality. Turkey's 55,390 against roughly 90,000 real mosques is high coverage. Indonesia's 78,454 is perhaps a tenth of its true number.

So a dense patch on this map means a well-mapped place first and a Muslim one second, and an empty one means almost nothing at all.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. All ten kinds appear:

Place of worship — the mosque or musalla itself. 82.5% of this map.
Burial site — Muslim cemeteries and graveyards. 10.3%.
Religious building — a building tagged as a mosque that no other rule named. 4.3%.
School — madrasas and Islamic schools, including those recorded as educational institutions rather than schools.
Grounds — the plot mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
Office, former site, marker, community building, monastery — each present, in hundreds or fewer.

The marker row is 129, and it is worth saying what that number is not. Set beside the Christian map's 370,000 wayside crosses and shrines, or the Shinto map's 7,774 roadside markers, it is tempting to read it as a statement about Muslim devotional practice. It is not one. Mazars, dargahs, türbe and roadside shrines are numerous across South and Central Asia, Anatolia, the Balkans and North Africa; OpenStreetMap records them as tombs and mausolea rather than as wayside shrines, and those tags are not what this row counts. Read the 129 as a difference in tagging, not in devotion.

Two oddities you may notice. 291 sites on this map are tagged as Muslim on a building recorded as a church. Some are genuine conversions, some are tagging mistakes, and nothing in the data distinguishes them — so they are drawn as Muslim sites, which is right for the conversions and wrong for the mistakes.

And 469 objects tagged as Muslim are drinking-water points and wells — sabeels, more numerous in the data than every Muslim shrine on the map. They are deliberately left off, on the grounds that a water point is not a site. That is a judgement, and you may disagree with it.

Which sites count as Muslim

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `muslim`, or when it is tagged as a mosque building. That second rule is safe: of 93,910 buildings tagged as mosques, 93,874 also say Muslim — 99.96%, the highest agreement of any such rule on this site — so it recovers about 13,900 mosques carrying no religion tag.

Branches of Islam — Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Ahmadiyya, Ibadi — are recorded in OpenStreetMap's `denomination` tag rather than its `religion` tag. They are shown in the details panel when you click a site, and they do not affect whether a site is on this map. Sunni alone accounts for over 83,000 of them.

Yazidi, Yarsan and Druze sites are not folded in. OpenStreetMap records each of them as a religion in its own right, and this map follows the tag, so they appear on the map of other religions. How those communities describe their own relationship to Islam is not a question a map should answer for them — but an alias table is exactly the mechanism by which small religions get absorbed into large ones and disappear from maps, so this one does not do that.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

Only 30% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline — the lowest share of any religion map here, because a mosque and a cemetery are both usually traced as areas. Those that have no outline are given a nominal, typical size rather than the smallest one.

Mosques are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. This is the layer it was designed for: a tenth of this map is burial grounds, which are vast, against mosques which are buildings. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact, and the largest symbols here are still cemeteries.

The three largest sites on this map are all genuine: Wadi al-Salam in Najaf, which is the largest cemetery on earth, the modern Najaf cemetery beside it, and the plain of Arafat, where pilgrims gather during Hajj.

Sites with no name

53% of the sites here carry a name — the lowest share of the nine — and the unnamed ones are shown just the same. A site with no name is one nobody has recorded a name for, not one that is not there.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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