The other day we did
a post on the anticipated global population crash which is projected to occur from about 2050 to 2200.
Now Denyse O'Leary has
reviewed a book by David Goldman titled
How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too) in which Goldman argues that the Islamic world is not immune from demographic collapse and that, in fact, the prospects of decline may be even more severe for Muslim populations:
Islam is dying because the Muslim birth rate - according to reliable statistics - has crashed. How badly?
Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.
Whatever they believe about Islam, they have one or two children, but rarely three or four. Not enough to deliver their societies from demographic collapse, given the size of the families they came from. For example,
The average young Tunisian woman - like her Iranian or Turkish counterpart - grew up in a family of seven children, but will bear only one or two herself.
Education for women doesn’t in itself cause birth dearth, but abandonment of the land does. Muslims are not immune from the urbanization that turns children who were once a source of wealth into a major cost centre. Increasing numbers of people, there as here, hope that others will undertake the trouble [of producing the next generation of children].
But surely some Muslims have large families? Those who do live in areas that are considered backward, and they cannot indefinitely prop up an unsustainably low urban birth rate. But because demographic decline happened so quickly in Muslim societies, the Western problem of too few young people supporting too many seniors will be much more severe, especially in countries with few natural resources, like Turkey.
A cratering population has serious implications for global terrorism according to Goldman:
“If we are surprised by Muslim demographics, it is because we have not listened carefully enough to what Muslims themselves have been trying to tell us.” Islamism is more of a last stand for many than a resurgent force, hence the glamor of suicide. If all this is correct, demographic collapse will increase rather than decrease the risk of terrorism, because “there is no such thing as rational self-interest for people who believe they have nothing to lose.”
....a culture’s suicidal resistance often increases at precisely the point where a huge conflict is irretrievably lost. This was true of the South in the closing days of the Civil War, and of Germany and Japan in World War II, for example. Many won’t be trying to win, only to inflict damage on the victor.
Even so, Goldman observes that internal demographic collapse is a more serious threat to Muslim countries than Islamic terrorism is to the West. No civilization has ever survived a situation in which a small number of young adults must support a large number of elderly as well as raise and support their own children. This, it appears, is the condition the whole world will soon find itself in.
