Portuguese is spoken by around 260 million people across Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and East Timor. Muslim communities in the Lusophone world range from centuries-old populations in East Africa to a rapidly growing community in Brazil.
Brazil's Muslim population has expanded through both immigration from the Levant and a steady rate of conversion. São Paulo in particular has a well-established community with mosques, schools and Portuguese-language religious publishing.
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau have substantial Muslim populations with a long history predating Portuguese colonisation, and Portuguese functions there as the administrative and educational language alongside local languages.
As with Spanish, Portuguese carries Arabic loanwords inherited from the Iberian period — alface, açúcar, alfaiate and many others — a linguistic trace of the same history.
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