Swedish contact with the Muslim world dates back to the 7th–10th centuries, when the Vikings traded with Muslims during the Islamic Golden Age. Since the late 1960s, Muslim immigration from the Middle East, Balkans and Horn of Africa has impacted the demographics of religion in Sweden, and has been the main driver of the spread of Islam in the country. Islam in Sweden increased the most as a result of high refugee influxes, notably during the Yugoslav Wars and the Somali Civil War in the 1990s; the Iraq War in the 2000s; and the Syrian civil war in the 2010s.

The Muslim community in Sweden hails from numerous countries, making it a complex and heterogeneous population. According to a 2019 report from the Swedish Agency for Support to Faith Communities, there were 200,445 Muslims in Sweden who practiced their religion regularly; this count came from those registered with Islamic congregations. The US Department of State's Sweden 2014 International Religious Freedom Report set the 2014 figure of Muslims in Sweden at around 600,000 people, 6% of the total Swedish population. The Pew Research Center reported that around 8% of the population—approximately 800,000 people—had a Muslim background in Sweden as of 2016.

Pre-Islamic Arabic coins originating from the Middle East have been found at Iron Age burial sites. Archaeological findings have also shown Viking contact with Islam dating back to the 7th–10th centuries, when the Vikings seem to have been trading with the medieval Islamic world, among others.

The Swedish census in 1930 listed 15 people as belonging to the group "Muslims and other Asian faiths". Although the number of Muslims themselves are not known, one estimate suggests a maximum of 11 but could have been as low as 2.

In modern Sweden, the first registered Muslim groups were Finnish Tatars who emigrated from Finland and Estonia in the 1940s. Islam began to have a noticeable presence in Sweden with immigration from the Middle East and Turkey beginning in the 1970s. Further waves of immigrants came to Sweden from the former Yugoslav republics, and more recently from Somalia and Syria.

Sweden has a number of mosques providing the Muslim communities in Sweden places of worship. The first mosque in Sweden was the Nasir Mosque [sq; sv], built in 1976 in Gothenburg by the Ahmadiyya. It was followed by the Malmö Mosque, 1984, and later, the Uppsala Mosque in 1995. More mosques were built during the 2000s, including the Stockholm Mosque (2000) and the Fittja Mosque (completed 2007), among others. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya have financially supported the constructions of some of the largest Mosques in Sweden.

The first meeting between Muslim youth organizations across Europe first took place in Sweden in 1995, in which the Foreign Ministry of Sweden worked with Sveriges Unga Muslimer to hold an international conference titled "Islam in Europe." This led to the creation of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO).

As of the year 2000, an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 people of Muslim background lived in Sweden, or 3.5% of total population; thereby included is anyone who fits the broad definition of someone who "belongs to a Muslim people by birth, has Muslim origin, has a name that belongs in the Muslim tradition, etc." regardless of personal religious convictions, of whom about 100,000 were second-generation immigrants (born in Sweden or immigrated as children). In Sweden registration by personal belief is not common and is normally against the law, thus only figures of practising Muslims belonging to an Islamic community can be reported. In 2009, the Muslim Council of Sweden reported 106,327 registered members.