Friday, February 15, 2013

Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed

 Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah
There remains a widely perceived notion—still  commonly held within intellectual, academic, and
policy circles in the West and elsewhere—that   ―Muslim‖ societies are especially resistant to
embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that has transformed population
profiles in Europe, North America, and other ―more developed‖ areas (UN terminology). But such
notions speak to a bygone era; they are utterly uninformed by the important new demographic
realities that reflect today's life patterns within the Arab world, and the grater Islamic world as well.

Throughout the Ummah, fertility levels are falling dramatically for countries and sub-national
populations--and traditional marriage patterns and living arrangements are undergoing tremendous
change. This brief note will highlight some of these changes, examine some of their correlates and
possible determinants, and speculate about some of their implications.

The Size and Distribution of the Global Muslim Population


There is some inescapable imprecision to any estimates of the size and distribution of the world’s
population of adherents to Islam (the Ummah)—an uncertainty that turns in part on questions about
the current size of some Muslim majority areas (i.e. Afghanistan, where as one US reference source
puts it, ―no comprehensive census based upon systematically sound methods has ever been taken‖1),
and in part on the intrinsic difficulties in determining the depth of a nominal believer’s religious
faith, but more centrally on the crucial fact that many government statistical authorities do not
collect information on the religious profession of their national populations. For example: while the
United States maintains one of the world’s most extensive and developed national statistical systems,
the American government expressly forbids the US Census Bureau from surveying the American
public about religious affiliation; the same is true in much of the EU, in the Russian Federation, and
in other parts of the ―more developed regions‖ with otherwise advanced data-gathering capabilities.

Nevertheless, on the basis of local population census returns that do cover religion, demographic
and health survey (DHS) reports where religious preference is included, and other allied data-
sources, it is possible to piece together a reasonably accurate impression of the current size and
distribution of the world’s Muslim population.
Figure 1 
The Ummah, circa 2005
Total Estimated Muslim Population in the World: 1.42 billion
Estimated Population Living in Muslim-Majority Countries: 1.03 billion
India:               
156 million
Ethiopia:         
26.7 million
Nigeria:          
64.2 million
China:               
20.3 million
Russia:               
15.0 million
USA:                 
4.7 million
Source: Graphic from Wikipedia Commons; 2005 populations from World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/

Two separate efforts to estimate the size and spread of the Ummah result in reasonably consistent
pictures of the current worldwide Muslim demography profile.  The first, prepared by Dr. Todd M.
Johnson of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary under the aegis of the World Christian
Database2, comes up with an estimate of 1.42 billion Muslims worldwide for the year 2005; by that
reckoning, Muslims would account for about 22% total world population. [SEE FIGURE 1] The
second, prepared by a team of researchers for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life3, placed
the total global Muslim population circa 2009, a few years later, at roughly 1.57 billion, which would
have been approximately 23% of the estimated human population at the time. [SEE FIGURE 2]

The Ummah, circa 2009
Total Estimated Muslim Population in the World: 1.57 billion
Estimated Population Living in Muslim-Majority Countries: 1.25 billion
Source: “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2009, available at
http://pewforum.org/newassets/images/reports/Muslimpopulation/Muslimpopulation.pdf

Although upwards of one fifth of the world’s population today is thus estimated to be Muslim, a
much smaller share of the population of the ―more developed regions‖ adheres to Islam: perhaps
just  over 3% of that grouping (that is to say, around 40 million out of its total of 1.2 billion people).
Thus the proportion of the world’s Muslims living in the less developed regions is not only
overwhelming, but disproportionate: well over one fourth of the population of the less developed
regions—something close to 26%-27%--would be Muslim to go by these numbers. 

As Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate, most of the world’s Muslim population inhabits a tropical and
semitropical expanse that stretches across Africa and Asia from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania
and Morocco to the Pacific archipelagos of Indonesia and the Philippines. The great preponderance
of the world’s Muslims live in Muslim-majority countries—73% according to the World Christian
Database, nearly 80% according to the Pew Forum study (which lists 49 countries and territories in
Asia, Africa and Europe that it identifies as Muslim-majority). Another tenth of the Ummah (roughly
160 million people as of 2009) lives within India, where Muslims are a religious minority. In all, eight
countries today account for over 60% of the world’s Muslim population: Indonesia; Pakistan; India;
Bangladesh; Egypt, Nigeria, Iran and Turkey. Note that only one of these eight is an Arab society in
the Middle East.
  
Dimensions of Fertility Decline in Muslim-Majority Countries, c.1975 – c.2005 
   
advantage here is that a number of authoritative institutions—most importantly, the United Nations
Population Division (UNPD)4 and the United States Census Bureau (USCB)5—regularly estimate
and project population trends for all the countries in the world.

The UNPD provides estimates and projections for period ―total fertility rates‖ (births per woman
per lifetime) for over 190 countries and territories across the planet for both the late 1970s and the
2005/10 period. Using these data, we can appraise the magnitude of fertility declines in 48 of the
world’s 49 identified Muslim-majority countries and territories.6 

One way of considering the changes in fertility in these countries is to plot a 45-degree line across a
chart and to compare fertility levels from three decades ago on one axis against recent fertility levels
on the other axis. A country whose fertility level remains unchanged over time will remain exactly on
this plotted line. If the fertility levels of the earlier time are plotted on the x-axis and the more
current fertility levels on the y-axis, any country whose fertility level rises over time will be above the
plotted line, whereas a country experiencing fertility decline will be located below the plotted line;
the distance of these datapoints from the plotted line indicates the magnitude of a country’s absolute
drop in fertility over these decades.

The results from for this exposition of data are displayed in Figure 3. [SEE FIGURE 3] As may be
seen, according to UNPD estimates and projections, all 48 Muslim-majority countries and territories
witnessed fertility decline over the three decades under consideration. To be sure: for some high- or
extremely-high-fertility venues in sub-Saharan Africa, where TFRs in the 6-8 range prevailed in the
late 1970s, declines are believed to have been marginal (think of Sierra Leone, Mali, Somalia and
Niger). In other some other places, where a fertility transition had already brought TFRs down
around 3 by the late 1970s, subsequent absolute declines also appear to have been somewhat limited
(think of Kazakhstan). In most of the rest of the Muslim-majority countries and territories, however,
significant or dramatic reductions in fertility have been registered—and in many of these places, the
drops in question have been truly extraordinary.
                                                
4
 United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, available electronically at
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm
5
 United States Bureau of the Census, International Data Base, available electronically at
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/informationGateway.php. 
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