London: More than one in 10 Muslims in England and Wales describe themselves as 'whites' as the number of conversions to Islam increases, according to 2001 Census, which has thrown up many such queer mixtures of ethnicity and religion.

A series of further unexpected figures are revealed by the Office for National Statistics regarding people's religion by ethnicity.

Sample this: There are the 79 Chinese who described their religion as 'Sikh' and the 127 Bangladeshis, 357 Pakistanis and 665 Indians who said that they were 'Jewish'.

The number of people describing themselves as 'Muslim' in the census, which recorded religion for the first time, comes to 15,46,626, of whom 1,79,773 say they are white.

Those in the ethnically white group break down into 63,042 British, 890 Irish and 1,15,841 "other" whites.

Aziz Sheikh, professor of primary care at Edinburgh University and a member of the Muslim Council of Britain, said he was surprised at the figure of one in 10 for white Muslims.

"It's not the feeling I get from the community," he said.

He noted that many white Muslims would be originally from places such as Turkish Cyprus, Bosnia and Albania, but remained surprised that 63,000 British white people should record their religion as Muslim.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said of the Asians who recorded their religion as Jewish: "We do have Eastern Jews who come from places like Mumbai, Iraq and Aden."

Significantly, the second largest group in the census are some 72,88,207 people who said they had no religion, just behind 3,59,67,798 white Christians, the largest religious group.

Muslims were the third biggest grouping although more than four million people refused to declare their religion.

A spokesman for the statistics office said that because the 2001 Census was the first to offer the chance for people to record their religion and ethnicity, it was impossible to identify trends.