Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change

by Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah


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.

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Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah

Source: http://www.aei.org/files/2012/03/21/-fertility-decline-in-the-muslim-world-a-veritable-seachange-still-curiously-unnoticed_102606337292.pdf

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.