The 23 Percent Solution

A Pew Research report shows that roughly one in four people worldwide are Muslim.

There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, "Mapping the Global Muslim Population," by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.

There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.

Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.

"Overall, the number is higher than I expected," he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The report can -- and should -- have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of "No God but God."

"Increasingly, the people of the Middle East are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of the worldwide Muslim community," he told CNN by phone.

"When it comes to issues of outreach to the Muslim world, these numbers will indicate that outreach cannot be focused so narrowly on the Middle East," he said.

And this is true. Islam's reach outside of the Middle East is growing very rapidly, and American foreign policy has to reflect that not all Muslims live in Southwest Asia.

Then again, Obama has been very keen on reaching out to the world's Muslims, and he has taken heavy attacks on that from the folks who honestly believe we're at war with all 1.57 billion of them.