"Some immigrants from the Middle East are Christians escaping persecution... But the vast majority are Muslims. Plausible estimates of the number of Muslims in America vary widely, from 1.3 million to five million. But there is a consensus that Muslim Americans’ share of the population is climbing.

According to a large survey by the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the number of people in America who described themselves as Muslims more than doubled between 1990 and 2008, from 527,000 to 1.35 million.

By other measures, too, American Muslims are thriving. According to the ARIS study, 35 percent of American Muslims age 25 years and older have college degrees, a share equal to or higher than that of any other religion except Judaism and “Eastern religions.” And a Cornell University study found that Muslim Americans generally earn more money than Americans of other religions.

The deeper irony in the ongoing debates over religious liberty and freedom of speech in America is that these debates wouldn’t even be allowed to take place across most of the Muslim world.

A December 2009 Pew Forum survey on religious freedom found that 70 percent of the world lives in areas of high restrictions of religion. Many of those affected are Christians living in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East.

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, freedom of religion is defined as the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. No matter how it is defined, religious freedom is not a right enjoyed by most of the approximately 12 to 17 million Christians in the Middle East."