With reasons contributing to the real aggregate Muslim number being below #139:
- Rehman and Askari count only 56 out of the OIC's 57 members, excluding the West Bank and Gaza, which ranks an extremely low #207.
- They mistakenly omit from their calculations two other of the worst-ranking OIC-member countries (Comoros at #200, Iraq at #201).
- The OIC includes some relatively high ranking countries with small percentages of Muslim population (such as Uganda at #73 and Gabon at #75).
- The OIC excludes some of the lowest ranking places (such as Eritrea at #204, Mayotte at #208).
- Ignoring population size of OIC members raises the score significantly: the five largest members (Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Egypt) all rank below #139, while four out of five of the smallest (Maldives, Brunei, Suriname, and Guyana) rank higher than #139.
- Because Muslims generally lag behind non-Muslims in modern times, the presence of large Muslim populations in high-ranking Muslim-minority countries (France, Israel, China, and India) artificially decreases the score of those countries and inflates the score of OIC members.
- Some places with almost no Muslims have bizarrely low rankings; in particular, two tiny British dependencies neighboring the homeland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, come in at #202 and #205, next to Sudan and Somalia, both straining credulity and improving OIC member rankings.
