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Well, it seems everyone is pretty casual with the facts here. This article say "80% of Cocos Islanders are Sunni Muslim" but cites a 2010 CIA World Fact File entry which says "Muslim (predominantly Sunni) 75%" so the percentage is wrong and we've gone from "predominantly Sunni" to the presumption of entirely Sunni. The culture article says "Around 65% of the Islands' Cocos Malay residents are practising Muslims" which cites a 2001 document which has many data points but I presume the relevant one is the "mid-2000" figure of 66.7% Muslim (no breakdown into Sunni etc) and says nothing about whether they are Malay or non-Malay and nothing about whether they are actively practising or not and have decided to go for a rounded figure for no obvious reason. Meanwhile for a more recent and arguable more authoritative data point the
2016 Census says 75% Islam (no breakdown by Sunni, Malay-ness, or practicing). I'd suggest reporting the 2016 census in both articles, and maybe add a comment about being predominantly Sunni citing the CIA. I don't think we can or should say anything about "Malay residents" in talking about the current population. With the arrival of the Malays occurring in the 1800s, it's not entirely appropriate to describe them as "Malay residents" any more, they are Australian citizens as much as the rest of us, and the 2016 census for Cocos shows this with 82.5% born in Australia and 74.0% had both parents born in Australia and a further 9.6% with one parent born in Australia. If we want to say something about their Malay-ness, I think the only reliable thing we can say is that 2016 census tells us that 69.6% of Cocos population speak Malay at home (and while one suspects these are probably the same folk as the 75% reporting as Islamic, the census does not "prove" that). So I'd been inclined to report the two data points (language, religion) separately and make no statement about their inter-relationship (let the reader decide what to make of it all).
Kerry (
talk)
09:43, 7 October 2019 (UTC)reply
Thanks for digging up the detail on that,
Kerry. I was just noting in passing because I'm trying to work through my (ever-extending) list of things to do/clean up after being away for a few weeks, but I'll make a note and try to come back to this one sometime.
Laterthanyouthink (
talk)
12:21, 7 October 2019 (UTC)reply