Mexico

The principal mode through which women have come to know Islam in Mexico is via religious conversion. While some accounts speculate that Muslims may have arrived in the country as early as in the sixteenth century, migrants are known to have traveled to Mexico as of the late nineteenth century during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. Most of these migrants were male, meaning that another mode through which Mexican women have encountered Islam is marriage. The most recent census of 2010 puts Mexico’s Muslim population at 3,760 people, consisting of 1,392 women and 2,368 men, giving a ratio of 1.7 Mexican Muslim males to every female. Further research is required to examine the dependability of these figures however, as individuals may have reasons for hiding their Islamic identity or census returns may have been completed by relatives. A number of converts to Islam are young adults who still live in their parental homes, where their new religious identity is not always accepted.