by Paul Morland
From the middle of the twentieth century, piecemeal and patchy modernisation in the region started to become more consistent, uniform and powerful. The human tide was gathering force. Material conditions for ordinary people remained meagre at best but a gradual growth of transportation, education and health care facilities was making its mark here as elsewhere. The result was a repeat of the pattern first seen in Britain more than a century earlier and subsequently replicated or being replicated across the globe, albeit at a far greater pace.
As ever, infant mortality is a good indicator of what was happening. In North Africa as a whole, it fell from 20% to under 3% between 1950 and 2017. In Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East and North Africa, it fell from over one in four to under one in twenty over the same period. Life expectancies lengthened significantly (for example, Libyans have gone from living to their mid thirties to surviving into their early seventies since the middle of the twentieth century). Meanwhile, typical of countries in demographic transition, fertility rates at first held up: Iraqi and Saudi women were typical in continuing to have six children each well into the 1980s.
The result has been, in line with patterns observed elsewhere, the ballooning of population sizes and the extreme youth of societies. Egypt’s 20 million in 1950 is fast approaching 100 million while Algeria’s 9 million has passed 40 million during the same period, despite large-scale emigration to France; in short, populations are multiplying four- or fivefold in not much more than half a century.18 It is this phenomenon that lies at the heart of the demographic whirlwind: namely, later demographic transitions have tended to be significantly more intense and result in greater population growth, with countries in the post-war developing world, including in the Middle East and North Africa, quadrupling their populations in half the time it took England to do so. This is, in a sense, a ‘last mover advantage’, and it will mean that European first-movers in the demographic transition will eventually be outnumbered by their later followers.
However, here as elsewhere, the power of the human tide has started to ebb. As Middle Eastern societies become more urban and literate, so their fertility rates have plunged. Egyptian women today are having three children, not six as was the case as recently as the 1970s. Libyan women, who were bearing more than seven and a half children each in the 1970s, are today having fewer than two and a half. Even Yemeni women have halved their fertility rate since the late 1980s. The medal for falling fertility, however, belongs to Iran, where the rate of childbearing was brought down from well over six in the early years of the Islamic revolution to under two just twenty years later. Sustained but then collapsing fertility, the extension of life expectancy and the booming population have both fed and been fed by the wider developments shaking the Middle East and North Africa.
Islam, Oil and Policy: The Makings of Middle Eastern and North African Demography
With rudimentary improvements in the quality of life having a big impact on infant mortality and life expectancy, the persistence at first of high fertility rates and their eventual fall as people became more urbanised and women more educated, one might expect the transition of the Middle East to resemble that of the West and Asia. However, fundamental differences and characteristics make the Middle Eastern story unique.
The role of Islam must be considered crucial. Very often, where Muslim populations have lived in close proximity to non-Muslims or as minorities in a predominantly non-Muslim state, they have experienced a relatively high fertility rate.19 This has been true of the Soviet Union in its later years and at times in the Balkans, Israel and south-east Asia. It is also to some extent true in India, where Muslims have had a persistently higher birth rate than Hindus, and in south Asia as a whole, where the birth rate of Pakistan has outstripped that of India. It is true as well of those countries in Western Europe which have received significant Muslim populations. As a consequence, the impression has often been given that there is something inherently pro-natalist about Islamic societies and therefore about Islam. This is rather reminiscent of those in France who in the first decade of the twentieth century feared that the Germans were inherently fertile and likely to generate an endlessly burgeoning population. It is reminiscent too of Germans taking exactly the same view of Russians in particular and Slavs in general at around the same time. Today, the Germans and Russians have among the lowest fertility rates of any of the major nations: neither, it turns out, was perennially fertile. Thus, while there is clearly a tendency to think of the fertility rate and population growth currently characteristic of a nation or ethnic group as perennial, demography often pulls surprises–races are not perennially fertile or unfertile, and neither are cultures, at least unchangingly. When circumstances change, the demography changes too.
With Islam, therefore, as with other religious cultures, there is nothing inherently high about its fertility. There are pro-natalist statements in the Quran and particularly in the Hadith, just as there are in the Bible: ‘Marry the one who is loving and fertile for I will be proud of your great numbers before the nation.’20 The Quran is clearly against infanticide, which perhaps was common in pre-Islamic societies: ‘Kill not your children on a plea of want. We provide sustenance for you and them. Come not near shameful deeds, whether open or secret. Take not life which Allah has made sacred.’21 However, according to most interpretations, this does not forbid the use of contraceptives.22 Abortion in the first few months of pregnancy is generally seen as permissible. One Hadith of the Prophet says:
All of us have been kept as a drop of seed… for forty days. Then for another forty days, it remains in the form of a clot of blood. Then another forty days it remains as a lump of flesh. Then an angel is sent to the foetus who blows spirit [life] into it.23
There have been occasions when the Islamic authorities have opposed birth control, such as Deobandi hardliners in Pakistan in the 1960s, but this is the exception rather than the rule.24 There has been no blanket ban on birth control by significant religious authorities in the Muslim world as there has been in the Roman Catholic Church (however much these may in fact be ignored by Catholic practitioners). Indeed, reflecting early concerns about rising population, a fatwa permitting contraception was issued by Egypt’s Grand Mufti as early as 1937.25
Yet there are certain characteristics of some Islamic societies which can predispose them to higher fertility. A reluctance to educate women and the correspondingly low levels of female literacy in parts of the Islamic world are associated with a high fertility rate. In a society where birth outside marriage is very rare, the existence of women living outside marriage guarantees a certain rate of childlessness; however, the probability of a woman remaining unmarried and therefore almost by definition childless is reduced where polygamy is practised, as in much but by no means all of the Islamic world. The early marriage of women also tends to a higher fertility rate, and across the Arab world the average age for a woman at first marriage is still low. Meanwhile, in Morocco and Tunisia female participation in the workforce remains at less than half the world average, and at less than a third in Egypt. This is another correlate of high fertility.26
Pro-natalism, therefore, is perhaps more associated with Islamic cultures than with Islam as such, and this may explain the slow and sluggish efforts in many places on the part of regimes to propagate family planning. In Egypt, for example, a study in the early 1970s found that barely one in ten married women had attended a family planning clinic, at that stage still overwhelmingly the most common way in which contraception was obtained.27 Once policies were adopted, however, they could be very effective. The speed with which fertility rates fell in Iran has already been noted, and although this may have happened anyway, it was certainly prompted by the Islamic Republic.
Indeed, Iran makes an interesting case study, which in some ways resembles China. The Khomeini regime which took power in 1979 was at first pro-natalist, as was Mao’s–again like Mao’s basing this stance on its ideology. The Shah’s family planning progr
ammes were partly discontinued and, with the outbreak of war with Iraq in 1980, the permitted age of marriage was lowered. There was a modest rise in what was already a high fertility rate and by the end of the decade the Mullahs were starting to get alarmed at the burgeoning population growth. Fatwas were produced confirming the acceptability of birth control while programmes of family planning were reintroduced and expanded; the first state-supported condom manufacturing facility in the Middle East was established. The results were dramatic, with fertility rates falling to two and below by the early years of the twenty-first century. Now the Iranian government, like the Chinese, is starting to have second thoughts, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei saying that he is ‘shaking with fear’ over the ageing of the population and its low fertility rate; he is introducing a fourteen-point programme to encourage the birth rate, including free maternity wards, longer maternity leave and a move not only to end free vasectomies but to make them illegal.
However, with high levels of female literacy, and higher levels of education and urbanisation, it is debatable whether even a complete about-face by the regime will materially impact the choices made by Iranian women. The latest UN data shows Iranian fertility rates not much higher than those in Russia, at sub-replacement level and falling. Stories of young urban Iranians avoiding parenthood suggest both economic and political motives. ‘If I were to give up my job to have kids, how would we manage to rent a house for ourselves?’ complains one middle-class woman in Teheran. ‘I don’t want to bring children into this hell,’ complains one recent college graduate disaffected with the regime, while another admits to having had two illegal abortions, saying: ‘We are really serious about not having kids.’28 Yet there also seems to be a cultural aspect, beyond economic or political concerns, making young Iranians sound rather like their Japanese peers in associating early marriage and childbearing with conservatism, religiosity and lifestyle limitations. Even Islamic societies, it seems, are not immune to the second demographic transition, in which fertility choices are more a reflection of personal values and preferences than of purely material conditions, and many eschew parenthood altogether to prioritise other projects.
Although generally fertility rates have held above two and have even risen in recent years (in Egypt and Algeria, for example), it is striking how low fertility rates have fallen not only in Iran but also in Lebanon, where at under 1.75 children per woman, fertility is even lower than in Iran. Here too there may be a religious element in the overall picture. Throughout the Middle East, Christians tend to have lower fertility rates than Muslims, and Lebanon still has by far the highest share of Christians of any population in the region. The sharp falls in fertility rates here in more recent years have been associated with somewhat rising marriage ages and an increase in the use of contraceptives;29 they have also been associated with rising levels of female education, even if, relative to other areas, the region still lags in this respect. Urbanisation too has played its parts. There is nothing special about the fall in fertility in the region; what has required some explanation has been its delay.
Beyond religious ideology and government policy, there is also the abundance and influence of oil in the shape of the oil-rich Gulf. While the benefits of the oil bonanza were not evenly spread across the region, they did provide employment and remittance benefits even for populations outside the oil states, and this may have supported high fertility rates across the region into the 1970s and 1980s.30 The oil states themselves have unusual and skewed population patterns. They tend to have high but falling fertility rates (from over seven to under three since the early 1980s in Saudi Arabia, for example) and long life expectancy supported by relatively high-quality health care (up from below forty-five to over seventy-five in the UAE since 1950, for example), but the most astonishing thing in terms of population has been the influx of immigrants, most of them offering low-skilled cheap labour. Qatar, for example, has seen its population grow from 25,000 to 2.5 million since the post-war years, a figure achieved not through impossibly high natural growth but rather by immigration of labourers–less than 20% of Qataris are indigenous.31
While the basic forces contributing to population growth–falling mortality and particularly infant mortality rates and persistently high fertility–are not unusual, they have been achieved here differently from elsewhere. It might be argued that in this region they have been more ‘exogenous’ than in other societies, and have often been achieved in large part either through aid programmes from the West or by intra-regional transfers funded ultimately by the oil boom. Today, Egypt in part manages to feed its population thanks to aid from the US and Saudi Arabia: without these funds, and without health care and other welfare programmes provided from outside, it is hard to see how Egyptians would have managed to stretch longevity into the early seventies. This creates a vulnerability in populations quite unlike those from Britain to China, which have effectively pulled themselves up numerically and in every other way by their own boot straps. It means that if the oil price plummets sufficiently for Saudi Arabia to cut its support, or if Cairo and Washington fall out, Egypt’s population would be at risk. Migration, which has so far occurred over the Mediterranean, might eventually be seen as but a foretaste of what is to come. A hundred million hungry, desperate Egyptians poised on the Mediterranean shores would knock into the shade any migration crisis Europe has seen to date.
Population Pressure and Implosion
Cause and effect are the currency of history and the social sciences. No matter how national policies are pursued, demography is not an external factor, injected into a society from outside and simply having a one-way impact; rather, it emerges from society itself, and is as much caused by its environment as it is shaped by it. Nevertheless causal links can be traced from demographic patterns to the way the world works and the way in which events unfold. And while the human tide does not determine the course of history, it moulds it, and it seems clear in most cases that a different demography would have led to a different outcome. Demography cannot be extricated from the socio-economic failings of the Middle East and North Africa, and in many places has fomented the political collapse. Failed states and civil war are more likely where there are young, fast-growing populations, particularly where these are not successfully integrated into the economy and where opportunities for making a productive contribution to society are closed off.
The Middle East and North Africa have many problems which are particularly associated with political instability, the lack of democracy and human rights and a failure in socio-economic development. The oil-rich states are able to provide their populations with a high standard of living and social and health services, but even here educational attainment and human productivity are poor. The region’s shortcomings and failures need to be addressed head-on, but before doing so and arousing sensitivities, three points need to be made. First, the region’s shortcomings can be attributed in some part to demography, although this is not to say that there are simplistic solutions–the plugging in of Western-style political and economic institutions has clearly failed where it has been tried. Second, while it is easy to be dismissive of the conspiracy theories which are rife in the region, it cannot be denied that outside intervention, whether well intentioned or not, has been frequent and usually unhelpful. Finally, it would be wrong to blame the region’s failings entirely on its religious culture–there have been periods in history when Islam has underpinned the most innovative and flourishing societies.
There is a huge variation in income levels across this region: in per capita terms, some of the countries under consideration are among the richest in the world, and this is entirely due to the presence of hydrocarbons for export. Qatar has one of the highest per capita incomes of any country in the world thanks to the scale of its exports of gas and its relatively small population. Yet the successes or failures of the area as a whole cannot be simply assessed on the basis of income. Moreover, even in purely economic terms, the Arab world has lit
tle to boast of: in 1999, before the oil price spiked upward, the collective economies of the Arab countries were smaller than that of Spain.32 Turkey has had more economic success in recent years but remains at best a middle-income country. And Iran’s economic progress has been hindered by its confrontation with the international community and the resulting sanctions, only lightened relatively recently.
One way of analysing socio-economic development which takes into account such chance effects as income coming from large-scale oil and gas production is to compare the human development of a country relative to that of other countries with a similar income. A study in 2002 found that the overwhelming majority of Arab countries, whether impoverished or super wealthy, were underachieving on levels of human development versus other countries of similar income.33 The Human Development Index used for such exercises, which weights education, health and income, may have imperfections, but looking at individual measures, the same picture emerges. For a start, participation in the workforce is low, whether due to general unemployment or specifically to low female employment. The employment to population ratio stands at 46%, making the Arab countries worse than any other region in the world on this index.34 Water consumption per capita is 20% of the world average and 2% in Yemen, a sign of low standards of living.35 It might be objected that this is a dry region and so low water consumption is to be expected, but the problem of water shortages in dry climates has been tackled successfully, for example (if not very sustainably) in the US south-west and (more sustainably) in Israel, through conservation, recycling and desalination. If water insecurity is a problem, so is food insecurity. Cereal imports in the region as a whole represent more than one-half of supply versus 15% for the world as a whole.36 That makes the Middle East and North Africa one of the parts of the world least able to feed itself. As has often been pointed out, Egypt was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire but is now heavily dependent on imports to feed its large and growing population. Egypt’s inability to feed itself is a product not only of a large and growing population but also of poor agricultural productivity.
