The Muslim World's Coming European Revolution

http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2011/04/04/the_muslim_worlds_coming_
european_revolution_106230.html

The Muslim World's Coming European Revolution
By Philip Jenkins

A revolution is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. No, not the one 
you've been hearing about in the media -- all the protests against 
dictatorship and oppression, in Egypt and Tunisia, and most violently, in 
Libya. The revolution I'm referring to certainly affects all those countries, 
profoundly, but its effects promise to outlast any change of regime, or even 
any new constitutions. Barely noticed by the West, many Muslim societies are 
experiencing a demographic transformation that is going to make them look far 
more European: more stable, more open to women's rights and above all, more 
secular. That change underlies all the current political upsurges.

The magic number in this story is 2.1, which is the fertility rate a society 
needs if its population is to remain constant. If the typical woman has 
significantly more than 2.1 children during her life, then that society's 
population will expand, and it will be a youthful community. If the rate 
falls below 2.1, then populations will stagnate and decline, and the average 
age will rise.
 
According to a familiar stereotype, Europeans have lost the long term vision 
that would make them want to have large families, and religion no longer 
provides such an incentive: the closer a woman lives to Rome, the fewer 
children she has. When commentators look at modern Europe, they worry about 
the long term prospects for low fertility nations like Italy (1.39), Germany 
(1.41) and Spain (1.47). Pundits are all the more concerned when they compare 
these European rates with the notoriously high-fertility Third World 
demographic profiles that long prevailed across the Middle East. It's not 
difficult to imagine a scenario in which those mainly Muslim Middle 
Easterners outbreed and overwhelm the staid Europeans, creating an 
Islamicized Eurabia.

But here's the problem. In just the last thirty years or so, those very 
Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have 
gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, 
Algeria's fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to 1.75, Tunisia's from 6 
to 2.03, Morocco's from 6.5 to 2.21, Libya's from 7.5 to 2.96. Today, 
Algeria's rate is roughly equivalent to that of Denmark or Norway; Tunisia's 
is comparable to France. Counter-intuitively, that remark about "the closer 
to Rome" also holds good on the southern, Muslim, side of the Mediterranean.

Just what is happening here? Everything depends on the changing attitudes and 
expectation of the women in these once highly-traditional societies. Across 
the region, women have become increasingly involved in higher education, and 
have moreover moved into full-time employment. That sea-change simply makes 
it unthinkable for women to manage a rampaging tribe of seven or eight 
children. Often, too, images of women's proper role in life have been upended 
by extended contacts with Europe. Migrants to France or Italy return home 
with changed attitudes, while families who stay at home find it hard to avoid 
the media portrayals of Western lives they see via cable and satellite dish. 
Maybe Europe and the Middle East are merging into one common Eurabia - but 
it's far from clear which side is doing a better job of imposing its opinions 
on the other. Presently, it looks as if the Maghreb is becoming European.

Such a wrenching change cannot fail to have political implications. In a 
country with a Third World fertility rate, it is very unlikely that women 
will seek or be granted education: their designated career path as mothers is 
starkly clear. Meanwhile, adolescents and young men proliferate, and provide 
ample cannon fodder for armies or militias, to whom life is cheap. (Yemen's 
fertility rate is still over 5.0, Somalia's is 6.4). But then imagine a 
newer, more European society, in which men and women are intensely concerned 
about their nuclear families, and have invested their love and attention into 
just one or two offspring. As citizens become more educated, they are not 
prepared to accept the demagoguery and systematic corruption that has long 
passed for government in those regions. They see themselves as responsible 
members of a civil society, with aspirations that demand to be met: they feel 
they deserve full democratic participation. Of course the recent turmoil 
began in Tunisia, with its very low fertility rate and its intimate ties to 
France.

Sudden demographic change also seems to be closely linked to secularization, 
a point of potentially great significance in the Middle East. Smaller family 
sizes can result from a decline in religious ideologies, but falling 
fertility can itself drive such a decline, as has happened in modern 
Christian Europe. When children abounded, as they did in the 1950s, strong 
pressures kept families close to religious institutions, as they sought 
common religious training and religious rituals. parents attended churches to 
ensure their children received the familiar cultural heritage. Church 
prestige rode high when priests were shepherding hundreds of local children 
through annual confirmation classes. But as the children became scarce from 
the 1970s onwards, so the churches emptied. At the same time, couples highly 
concerned with their own personal and emotional fulfillment became 
increasingly impatient about clerical attempts to enforce morality laws. 
Women, especially, became highly disaffected from the mainstream churches.

If the European precedent is anything to go by, that could well provide a 
model for religious developments in the Maghreb over the next decade or two. 
A society so dependent on women in the school and the workplace simply cannot 
support the kind of intransigent orthodoxies offered by the familiar 
Islamists. Extremists may not vanish overnight, but they will have to adapt 
substantially to present their message in a civil society with a powerful 
taste for democratic values and gender equality.

Demography is not, of course, the whole story. But it has to play a full part 
in any attempt to understand the current political revolutions in the Middle 
East.

Philip Jenkins teaches at Penn State University.

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