A Demographic Shift in the Muslim World

(It is perhaps due to succumbing to excessive materialism and having a fear of going slow at the pace of economically advanced world. The countries shown in the following report going down in fertility rate are highly under the sway of materialist cultures of the West. Living in a Gulf State for last about three and half decades I observe great family problems there. Since the women have made entering in the earning race their first choice, sound family system has started crumbling. They can neither feel easy to have three, four or five... uncared-for children nor socially live without children, so less number of the children is less troubled way for them. Alarming rise in school fees and other expenses of getting the children educated in upper grades has shaken their beliefs and principles.  Very interestingly, having double income after both the husband and wife at work, financially strong and comparatively with high living standards families feel much more discomforting with more than two or three children. Materialism is causing a rapid damage to motherhood and fatherhood.  Material provisions are thought supplant for the delicate feelings of affection and tenderness towards children. 

And one more thing! When we find the people, both men and women, pressing the buttons of remotes to watch their favorite programs on TV channels, preoccupied with internet, messaging on mobiles in the lifts, on the footpaths and in parks and gardens, busy in chat on Skype even while driving and sometimes during  the duty hours, does it remain easy for them to attend their children? Multinational companies hiring the brains with a new philosophy of unlimited working hours are another heartless factor making the family life subject to breakage.

 Long before the level of costly education in the colleges and universities a new corps of nurseries and preparatory schools for the kids of three and sometimes less than this  has grown taking the advantage of too much busy working life of the parents. The working couples feel compelled to get their kids 'sheltered' there at least several hours to feel easy during their job time. Fee charges are unimaginably high in these nurseries. Parents can't afford this burden for a number of children above a pair of kids. All this is becoming the root of fall of fertility in the Muslim world. Munir Ahmed Khalili)

By David Ignatius

Something startling is happening in the Muslim world — and no, I don’t mean the Arab Spring or the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. According to a leading demographer, a “sea change” is producing a sharp decline in Muslim fertility rates and a “flight from marriage” among Arab women.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, documented these findings in two recent papers. They tell a story that contradicts the usual picture of a continuing population explosion in Muslim lands. Population is indeed rising, but if current trends continue, the bulge won’t last long.

Eberstadt’s first paper was expressively titled “Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed.” Using data for 49 Muslim-majority countries and territories, he found that fertility rates declined an average of 41 percent between 1975-80 and 2005-10, a deeper drop than the 33 percent decline for the world as a whole.

Twenty-two Muslim countries and territories had fertility declines of 50 percent or more. The sharpest drops were in Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait, which all recorded declines of 60 percent or more over three decades.

Fertility in Iran declined an astonishing 70 percent over the 30-year period, which Eberstadt says was “one of the most rapid and pronounced fertility declines ever recorded in human history.” By 2000, Iran’s fertility rate had fallen to two births per woman, below the level necessary to replace current population, according to Eberstadt and his co-author, Apoorva Shah.

A July 2012 Financial Times story placed the Iranian fertility rate even lower and cited a U.N. report warning that Iran’s population will begin to shrink in two decades and will decline by more than 50 percent by the end of the century if current trends continue.

Big cities in the Muslim world have seen especially sharp drops. Eberstadt notes that only six states in the United States have lower rates than Istanbul. In Tehran and Isfahan, Iran, fertility rates are lower than those of any state in the United States.

Eberstadt argues that the fertility decline isn’t just a result of rising incomes and economic development, though these certainly played a role: “Fertility decline over the past generation has been more rapid in the Arab states than virtually anywhere else on earth.”

The CIA’s World Factbook reports Muslim fertility rates slightly higher than Eberstadt’s estimates but generally below those of many sub-Saharan African, Latin American and Asian countries.

Accompanying this fertility decline is what Eberstadt calls a “flight from marriage,” which he described in a paper presented last month in Doha, Qatar. His data show that in many areas of the world, men and women are getting married later or remaining unmarried. Divorce rates are also rising, especially in Europe, along with the percentage of extramarital births.

The decline of marriage in Europe is well-known but still striking: The female marriage rate fell in Germany from 0.98 to 0.59 from 1965 to 2000; it fell in France over that period from 0.99 to 0.61; in Sweden from 0.98 to 0.49; in Britain, from 1 to 0.54.

Marriage is also plummeting in Asia: In Japan, the percentage of women between 30 and 34 who have never married rose from 7.2 percent in 1970 to 26.6 percent in 2000; inBurma, it rose from 9.3 percent to 25.9 percent; in Thailand, from 8.1 percent to 16.1 percent; in South Korea, from 1.4 percent to 10.7 percent.

Marriage rates in the Arab world are higher, but they’re moving fast in the same direction. What’s “astonishing,” says Eberstadt in an e-mail explaining his findings, is that in the Arab world, this move away from marriage “is by many measures already as far along as was Europe’s in the 1980s — and it is taking place at a vastly lower level of development than the corresponding flights in Europe and developed East Asia.

“Something really big is under way — and practically no one has noticed it, even in the Arab world,” argues Eberstadt.

These studies are a reminder that the big demographic trends shaping the world are mysterious and often overlooked. The Arab world may be experiencing a youth bulge now, fueling popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. But as Eberstadt notes, what’s ahead over the next generation will probably be declines in the number of working-age adults and rapidly aging populations.

The Arab countries are now struggling with what Eberstadt calls their “youthquake.” But the coming dilemma, he notes, is “how these societies will meet the needs of their graying populations on relatively low income levels.”

davidignatius@washpost.com

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