How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

For the first time in history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return. But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe’s catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. Iranian women in their twenties who grew up with five or six siblings will bear only one or two children during their lifetimes. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries—but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world. Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.

Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern political theory, which is based on the principle of nations’ rational self-interest. At the threshold of extinction, the political scientists’ clever models break down. We “do not negotiate with terrorists.” But a bank robber holding hostages is a terrorist of sorts, and the police negotiate with such miscreants as a matter of course. And what if the bank robber knows he will die of an incurable disease in a matter of weeks? That changes the negotiation. The simple truth—call it Spengler’s Universal Law #1—is A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a “rational self-interest.”

Of the more than six thousand languages now spoken on the planet, two become extinct each week, and by most estimates half will fall silent by the end of the century.6 A United Nations report claims that nine-tenths of the languages now spoken will become extinct in the next hundred years.7 Most endangered languages have a very small number of speakers. Several are disappearing tribal languages spoken in the Amazon rainforest, the Andes Mountains, or the Siberian taiga. Perhaps a thousand distinct languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, many by tribes of only a few hundred members. Eighteen languages have only one surviving speaker. It is painful to imagine how the world must look to these individuals. They are orphaned in eternity, wiped clean of memory, their existence reduced to the exigency of the moment.

Fertility has fallen so far in parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian will be endangered within a century, and German, Japanese, and Italian within two.

Uh, I have some bad news about Ukrainian, boss.

The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon and the Islamist boast, “You love life, and we love death.” Which brings us to Spengler’s Universal Law #2: When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair.

Paradoxically, it is possible for wars of annihilation to stem from rational choice, for the range of choices always must be bounded by the supposition that the chooser will continue to exist. Existential criteria trump the ordinary calculus of success and failure. If one or more of the parties knows that peace implies the end of its existence, it has no motive to return to peace. That is how the radical Islamists of Hamas view the future of Muslim society. A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome. Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.

From the advent of Christianity to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the West saw politics through the lens of faith. St. Augustine’s fifth-century treatise The City of God looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood that civil society as a congregation—a body bound together by common loves, as opposed to Cicero’s state founded only on common interests. (In the concluding chapter, we will consider Augustine’s view as a lodestar for an American foreign policy that realistically addresses the threats created by the imminent demographic collapse of nations.) We might call Augustine’s view “theopolitics.” A millennium later, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes changed the subject, to the individual’s desire for power, wealth, and personal survival. Hobbes, the seventeenth-century grandfather of modern political science, introduced a radically truncated anthropology, centered on the individual’s struggle for survival. The state, he argued, was a compact among individuals whose survival prospects were poor in a “state of nature”; thus they ceded their individual rights to a sovereign in return for protection. A century later Montesquieu added differences in climate, terrain, and resources to the mix. The modern view of atomized man motivated only by the pursuit of material advantage is loosely known as “geopolitics.” What prompted this revolution in political thinking that has left modern political theory without the tools to understand the ca...

causes and implications of the current demographic collapse? Undoubtedly, the terrible religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries poisoned the idea of faith-based politics. Europe fought dynastic and political wars under the false flag of religion until the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 destroyed almost half the population of Central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia that ended this fearful war forever buried the political model that Christendom had advanced since Augustine: a universal Christian empire that would keep the peace and limit the arbitrary power of kings.

But things are not as simple as they seem in the standard account of the violence that soured the West on theopolitics. For—as we shall see—the nation-states that opposed universal empire were founded on a contending kind of faith, a fanatical form of national self-worship whose internal logic was not played out until world war and genocide in the twentieth century, and the collapse of faith and fertility in the twenty-first. But when Thomas Hobbes published his great book Leviathan three years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it seemed credible that “the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” One powerful attraction of the Hobbesian revolution in political thinking was the power it promised to intellectuals. If politics reduces the individual to his material concerns, then it is possible to manipulate the individual through the alternation of his material circumstances. A clever elite could fix all the problems of the world. Immanuel Kant boasted in 1793 that he could write a constitution for a race of devils, “if only they be rational.” Europe ignored him and proceeded to destroy itself in the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars of the past century. Today, as in Kant’s time, the great frustration in world affairs is the refusal of some players to act rationally. Something was gained, but much more was lost, in the seventeenth-century Hobbesian revolution in political thought. To view human beings...

as creatures concerned solely with power, wealth, and security is an impoverished anthropology.

We can refuse for only so long to face the fact that we will die. Religion offers the individual the means to transcend mortality, to survive the fragility of a mortal existence. Homo religiosus confronts death in order to triumph over it. But the world’s major religions are distinguished by the different ways in which they confront mortality. We cannot make sense of the role of religion in demographic, economic, and political developments—and of the different roles of different religions in different places and times—without understanding the existential experience of the religious individual. It is challenging to recount this experience to a secular analyst; it is somewhat like describing being in love to someone who never has been in love. One doesn’t have to be religious to understand religion, but it helps.

Houellebecq read this passage and paraphrased it in Submission!

He wrote, Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.9 The soldier was Franz Rosenzweig, and the postcards would become his great book, The Star of Redemption. Awareness of death defines the human condition, so that human beings cannot bear their own mortality without the hope of immortality. And our sense of immortality is social. The culture of a community is what unites the dead with those yet to be born.

The first surviving work of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh written perhaps 3,700 years ago, recounts the Sumerian king’s quest for immortality. After a journey beset by hardship and peril, Gilgamesh is told: “The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.”

But not only the religious need the hope of immortality. The most atheistic Communist hopes that his memory will live on in the heart of a grateful proletariat. Even if we do not believe that our soul will have a place in heaven or that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, we nonetheless believe that something of ourselves will remain, in the form of progeny, memories, or consequences of actions, and that this something will persist as long as people who are like us continue to inhabit the earth. Humanity perseveres in the consolation that some immortal part of us transcends our death. Sadly, our hope for immortality in the form of remembrance is a fragile and often vain one. Immortality of this sort depends upon the survival of people who are like us—that is, upon the continuity of our culture. If you truly believe in a supernatural afterlife, to be sure, nothing can really disappoint you. But there is no consolation in being the last Mohican.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.

Perhaps why moksha is reserved for a select few. Most can't handle the truth.

Driving the demographics of Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, and other Muslim countries is a “locomotive” made up of people in their teens and twenties. They were born into families of six or seven children. But this “locomotive” has hit a demographic wall: these young people are having only one or two children. Today’s “bulge” generation of young Muslims, whose political humiliation and frustration over economic stagnation stoked the Arab rebellions of 2011, will be followed by a generation dramatically smaller than their own. Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian woman today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita, about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.

By the end of the century, under the assumption of constant fertility, the economically active population (aged 15 to 59 years) of Western Europe will fall by two-fifths, and of Eastern Europe and East Asia by about two-thirds. The working-age population of the United States will grow by about a quarter. The least fertile European countries will see their total populations drop by 40 to 60 percent in the course of the present century.

My bet is that this is optimistic, but immigration will take off.

But even more remarkable than the demographic decline of the industrial nations in Europe and the Far East is the speed at which Muslim nations are catching up to and in some cases overtaking the rest of the world in fertility collapse. World fertility has fallen by about two children per woman in the past half century—from about 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. Fertility in the Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster than the world average. The drastic drop-off in fertility has hit Arab, Persian, Turkish, Malay, and South Asian Muslims. Iran’s fertility has fallen by almost six children per woman, Turkey’s has fallen by five children per woman, Pakistan’s by more than three children per woman, and Egypt’s and Indonesia’s by four.

Most Muslim countries have no public pension or health systems. The aged rely on their children to care for them. Muslims now in their sixties and seventies have on average several working-age children. In Iran, Turkey, and Algeria, most old people will have one or two children at mid-century. Europe is already struggling to cope with an aging population and increased demands for pensions and health care. During the next forty years, the average age of the European population will increase only from forty to forty-six years. In most Muslim countries, the average age today ranges from late teens to late twenties—but by 2050, it may rise to forty years or more. Many of the largest Muslim countries may well catch up with Europe’s geriatric crisis in a generation and a half. By 2070, Iran will be grayer than Europe.

Most of the variation in birth rates among Muslim countries is explained by a single factor: literacy. Literacy is the threshold that separates traditional society from modernity. The moment Muslims learn to read, family size falls below replacement. Literacy explains about 60 percent of the fertility differential across the Muslim world. Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts. As soon as Muslim women break the constraints of traditional society, they have one child and sometimes two, but rarely three or four—and almost never the six or seven children that their mothers bore. This correlation holds whether we compare fertility among different Muslim countries or compare the fertility of women with differing educational levels within the same country, as we will see in the detailed data for Iran and Turkey.

Another factor is religious practice, itself inversely correlated with literacy. The more frequently Muslims attend mosque, the more likely they are to have big families, according to the World Values Survey—although data are available for only a small number of countries, and from years during which rapid change was under way. A third of the 88 percent-literate Turks never attend the mosque, according to the WVS polls, along with a quarter of 82 percent-literate Iranians (some recent news reports put mosque attendance in Iran even far lower)—and in both countries fertility is below replacement. By contrast, only a fifth of Egyptians never visit a mosque, and their fertility is correspondingly higher, at around 3 children per woman. And in illiterate Mali only 3 percent of respondents say they never to go a mosque—and the fertility rate jumps to 5.5 children per woman.

Modernity has attacked Muslim society in its most vulnerable organ—indeed, in the organ that was supposed to ensure Islamic triumph over the decadent West: the womb. But fragility does not make vulnerable Muslim countries less dangerous. On the contrary: whereas Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose.

“They want to eradicate the Turkish nation,” Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan averred in 2008. “That’s exactly what they want to do!” The “they” to whom Erdogan referred in his speech to a women’s audience in the provincial town of Usak means whoever is persuading Turkish women to stop bearing children. Turkey is in a demographic trap. Its birth rate has fallen, and its population is aging almost as fast as Iran’s. Speaking as a “worried brother” to his “dear sisters,” Erdogan implored his audience, “In order that our people may remain young, you should have at least three children.” No one listened. “Erdogan asked women to have three children, and demand for contraceptives went up,” sniffed a prominent Turkish academic.

Turkish fertility today is already below replacement and converging on European levels. It shows the same pattern we have seen in Iran and across the Muslim world: educated and literate Turkish women are having one and sometimes two children, while illiterate women in Anatolia’s eastern back country are having four. For Turkey, that constitutes an existential threat. The most fecund group in Turkey is the Kurds, the restive fifth of the country who have been fighting for independence for decades. By the middle of this century, two-fifths of the total Turkish population and the majority of military-age men likely will be Kurdish.

The meek will inherit the Earth. Kurdistan may come into being without a fight. Peaceful partition vote backed by the West?

The Iranian mother of seven children in the 1960s or 1970s had a primary school education, if any. By the mid-1980s, illiterate Iranian women had nearly five children. Women with a primary school education had an average of three and a half. Those with a high school diploma had slightly over two. But university-educated Iranian women had a fertility rate of just 1.3, about the same as the lowest levels registered in Western Europe. As more Iranian women went through the school system, the researchers conclude, fewer had children. The fertility rate for each education level also declined steadily, and the overall fertility rate imploded. The few remaining illiterate women in Iran—mainly in the restive eastern province of Baluchistan—still have seven children, and the minority of Iranian women with only a primary school education still have four children. But, no thanks to the Islamist regime, Iran’s women are the best educated in the Muslim world. Iran’s secular government under the late Shah put enormous efforts into education during the 1970s and 1980s, with the goal of eliminating adult illiteracy by 1985. A “Literacy Corps” allowed young men with a high school diploma to teach reading to illiterate children as an alternative to military service, and two hundred thousand volunteered. 6 Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution slowed but could not stop the literacy movement set in motion by the deposed Shah.

In the Islamists’ own view, the encounter of Islam with the globalized world has had catastrophic effects on a religion so deeply rooted in the habits of traditional society that it cannot survive in the harsh light of modernity. The closing of the Muslim womb is a symptom of a shock to the spiritual condition of the Islamic world, a loss of faith more sudden and more devastating than the past century’s trend towards secularism in the West. The vast majority of educated young Muslims are alienated from the traditional Islamic culture of previous generations and rebel quietly against the Islamists’ attempt to reimpose it on them by force. They have voted with their wombs. Like Europe, the Muslim world is engaged in the slow-motion suicide of failing to create the next generation. But the flip side of suicide by infertility is jihad. Islamists have responded to the disappearance of what former Iraqi minister of Finance, Defense, and Trade Ali A. Allawi calls “Muslims’ basic identity and autonomy”9 by mounting holy war on the West. The Muslim world is committing suicide. But we could die in the implosion.

During the thousand years between Charlemagne and Frederick the Great, the world’s population rose on average by 2.5 percent every half-century. With the agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth century, the world’s population rose by 20 percent in fifty years, for the first time in history. During the second half of the twentieth century, the world’s population grew by 140 percent. But that growth rate was always unsustainable—a blip in the statistics, the short lag between the point at which modern prosperity and medicine began to prolong lives and the point at which that improvement in life expectancy inevitably affected the birthrate. And it is about to fade in the rearview mirror. Population growth peaked in 2000 and will turn sharply negative during the last quarter of the twenty-first century.

From awareness that we will die arises culture—the capacity to order our behavior consciously rather than by instinct. Culture is the stuff we weave out of the perception of immortality, the bridge between generations. Every echo of our earthly footsteps will die out unless those who follow us inherit more than our genes. To speak of a “search for meaning” is pointless unless that “meaning” endures beyond our lifetime.

In 1950, seven out of ten people in the world lived in farming communities, and women on average bore five children. In the United States of 1800, nine-tenths of Americans lived on farms, and the average woman bore seven children during her lifetime. By 1900, when only half of Americans lived on farms, fertility had fallen to four children per woman, and in 2000 to only two children. The same thing is happening around the world. By 2007, the majority of the world’s people lived in towns or cities for the first time in history, and global fertility had fallen to 2.5 children per woman. And by 2050, seven out of ten people will live in urban areas.

The average cost of raising an American child to age seventeen is $222,360, according to a 2010 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s more than four years of after-tax income for the median American family, not counting university. Put it another way: a single child will cost nearly 30 percent of the median family’s spending power over the first seventeen years. Young families go into debt to raise children and pay the debts off when the children are grown. It’s not hard to finance a large family if you start having babies in your early twenties, take out a big mortgage to buy a family home, get the kids out of the house by your mid-forties, and spend the last twenty years of your working life saving for retirement. But that presumes that you plan your life around a prospective family, marrying young and having children right away. If you spend your first ten years out of college playing the field, you’re not likely to raise a big family.

Childless singles who spend their money on entertainment receive the same pension and medical benefits as people who raise big families. Without other peoples’ children, to be sure, the childless singles would starve in old age, because there would be no one to pay the taxes that fund their benefits. But nothing in the social safety net discourages free riding on other people’s child-rearing. If everyone decided whether or not to raise children on purely economic grounds, everyone would opt to keep child-raising costs to a minimum—in other words, to have no children at all—and let others pick up the tab. Society would disintegrate in a generation.

Our ancestors did not ask whether they preferred children to a larger condo and a Caribbean vacation. Whether they raised children out of love or obligation, we shall never know, for they never asked this sort of question. We do not know of a single case of fertility failure in a traditional society, that is, a society in which most people worked the land for subsistence. But traditional society is fragile. In the ancient world, as we shall see, infertility arrived with the Spartan warrior-state in which citizens practiced arms while slaves farmed, and with the Athenian imperial state where colonies subsidized an urban population. The modern fertility shift follows the migration from farm to city.

It seemed like Tunisia was doing all the right things. The country spends 7.3 percent of GDP on education, a higher proportion than the U.S., Finland, or Israel. Of course, its GDP is far lower, so absolute education expenditures are lower as well. Nonetheless, Tunisia’s education effort exceeds that of any other Muslim country, including 2 percent of GDP for university education. About 30 percent of secondary school graduates go onto university although 60 percent of them fail exams. The trouble is that their diplomas are largely worthless. Like most developing countries, Tunisia teems with diploma mills that issue worthless degrees to half-trained graduates. Even in India and China, the majority of engineering graduates do not meet international standards—although the elite universities in those countries do produce a huge number of first-rate engineers. No Arab country produces graduates who can compete with their East Asian counterparts; the only Muslim country whose graduates meet world standards is Turkey. University graduates throughout the Arab world have miserable prospects. “The average unemployment rate for the age group 15-24 years in the Group of Arab Countries reaches to 30%, compared with an average rate of world 14.4%,” according to the Arab Labor Organization. “Problem [sic] of high unemployment rates among the educated graduates from universities and colleges, which reaches to 26.8% in Morocco and 19.3% in Algeria, 17.7 % in Jordan. It was noted that 94% ...

of the unemployed in the Arab Republic of Egypt are in the age group 15-29 years, reflecting a lack of consistency of education plans to the needs of the Labor market.”

One out of ten Tunisians is an elderly dependent today; as the present generation ages, the ratio will rise to about the same level as in Western Europe, or two out of five. Even for wealthy Western Europe, caring for this army of pensioners will strain resources to the limit; a poor country simply has no way to manage. The trouble is that Muslim countries that invest heavily in education, of which Tunisia is the best example, never achieve a critical mass of graduates capable of competing with their East Asian peers in world markets. Excepting a thin stratum of Turkish university graduates, the products of Muslim universities are mostly unemployable. Wherever Muslim countries have invested heavily in secondary and university education, they have wrenched their young people out of the constraints of traditional society without, however, providing them with the skills to succeed in modernity. An entire generation of young Muslims has lost its traditional roots without finding new roots in the modern world. The main consequence of more education appears to be a plunge in fertility rates within a single generation, from the very large families associated with traditional society to the depopulation levels observed in Western Europe. Suspended between the traditional world and modernity, impoverished and humiliated, the mass of educated young Muslims have little to hope for and every reason to be enraged. In maleducated, underemployed, and depopulating Tunisia, the world can s...

see the impending future of Arab societies. Note from Daniel: I actually find this relatable. I left college (in America) quite unprepared for professional life and had to do a lot of work to catch up on what I missed. Universal education really does feel like a scam pushed on everyone during the 1960s/70s.

Egypt is Iran without oil, and Turkey without an educated elite. One might add that it is Gaza without foreign aid. Whether Egypt will remain a militarized state, or become a democratic state, or an Islamist state, cannot be guessed as this book goes to press. It seems most likely that Egypt will be a failed state.

As Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize winner, said after the January uprising, his country “is on the list of failed states,”10 and the Arab world is “a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”11 Even that glum assessment, though, does not capture the intractability of Egypt’s backwardness. According to a World Health Organization study, 97 percent of Egypt’s married women have suffered genital mutilation, and 70 percent stated their intention to arrange the similar mutilation of their daughters, even though the Egyptian government outlawed the practice in 2007.12 It is not simply that more than 40 percent of Egyptians are functionally illiterate, or that half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Most of the country is immured in a traditional society so rigid and remote from the modern world that modern political structures are as alien to it as quantum physics. Even Islamists have to eat. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Food comprises almost half the country’s consumer price index, and much more than half of spending for the poorer half of the country. This will get worse, not better.

It turns out that China, not the United States or Israel, presents the greatest existential threat to the Arab world, and through no fault of its own: rising incomes have gentrified the East Asian diet, and, more importantly, insulated East Asian budgets from food price fluctuations. Economists call this “price elasticity.” Americans, for example, will buy the same amount of milk even if the price doubles, but they will stop buying fast food if hamburger prices double. East Asians now are wealthy enough to buy all the grain they want. If wheat output falls, for example, because of drought in Russia and Argentina, prices rise until demand falls. The difference today is that East Asian demand for grain will not fall, because the Chinese are so much richer than they used to be. Someone has to consume less, and it will be the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, in this case the poorer Arabs.

With newly rich East Asians buying more grain at any price, the occasional poor harvest will push the wheat price through the ceiling, as it did during the past twelve months. To make life intolerable for the Arab poor, the price of wheat does not have to remain high indefinitely; it only has to trade out of their reach once every few years. And that is precisely what has happened. After thirty years of stability, the price of wheat has had two spikes into the $9 per bushel range at which very poor people begin to go hungry. The problem isn’t production. Wheat production has risen steadily, very steadily in fact. Wheat supply dropped by only 2.4 percent between 2009 and 2010—and the wheat price doubled. That’s because affluent East Asians don’t care what they pay for grain. Prices depend on what the last (or “marginal”) purchaser is willing to pay for an item (what was the price of the last ticket on the last train out of Paris when the Germans marched in on June 14, 1940?). Don’t blame global warming or unstable weather patterns: wheat supply has been fairly reliable. The problem lies in demand.

Egyptian young people with university degrees do not have sufficient skills to get a job with a multinational company, let alone run a country. Egypt churns out seven hundred thousand university graduates a year qualified to stamp each other’s papers and not much else, and employs perhaps two hundred thousand of them, mostly in government bureaucracy.20 Officially, Egypt’s unemployment rate is slightly above 9 percent, the same as America’s. But independent studies say that a quarter of men and three-fifths of women are jobless. As Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan said of the young people who put him in power, “I’m generalizing, but a large number of the Egyptian labor force is unemployable. The products of the education system are unemployable.”

A French researcher claims that “excess fertility of immigrants compared with women born in France” is only half a child per female on average, taking into account the drop in fertility after immigrants settle in France.25 That is small comfort for the United Kingdom, where Muslims from the Indian subcontinent form the dominant group of immigrants. Pakistan with its 50 percent literacy rate still has a fertility rate of more than three children per woman. And Pakistani fertility survives emigration to Britain. According to the Population Research Bureau, Britain’s population will rise to 77 million in 2050 from 63 million today. More than half of new births will come from immigrant mothers, and it is not known how many of the remaining births will come from second-generation immigrants.26 It appears that Muslim immigrant fertility will make Britain the most populous European country by 2050. It may be that the threat of a “Londonistan” in the United Kingdom is insufficiently appreciated while the prospect of a Turkish takeover in West Germany and the Senegalization of France are exaggerated.

Just as Iran’s bulge generation approaches retirement, Iran’s output of oil and gas is likely to shrink drastically. Iran’s GDP is just $7,000 per capita, mostly derived from oil and gas, and Iran’s oil production may fall to below domestic consumption requirements before 2020 because of the gradual exhaustion of reserves and neglect of needed investment.5 Estimates of Iran’s available reserves and explanations of the causes of its supply problems vary, but it seems likely that a combination of geology and incompetence will shrink state oil revenues—and the country’s capacity to subsidize consumption—precisely when Iran will need them the most. “Iran’s natural gas exports will be minimal due to rising domestic demand even with future expansion and production from the massive South Pars project,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy.6 Iran’s aging oil fields will lose an estimated 8 percent of output per year, according to the DOE, although secondary recovery measures can slow the rate of decline. In 2010, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2015, Iran’s oil production would fall by 18 percent, to 3.30 million barrels a day, compared to a 1970s peak of 6 million barrels per day.7 Even if secondary production methods reduce the decline from 8 percent a year to only 2 percent a year, oil output will fall by more than half by 2050, when an avalanche of retirees will make impossible demands on the Iranian economy. We have never seen anything like this before...

; we have difficulty imagining the degree of misery that will befall Iran. Assuming a 2 percent per annum decline in oil output—a relatively benign scenario—Iran will encounter precisely the sort of national disaster of which Ahmadinejad warns. The years of the institutionalized Islamic Revolution have been, relatively speaking, economically fat years, subsidized by oil and natural gas production. And yet in those fat years, the educated urban population is slipping into drug addiction, prostitution, and despair. What will Iran’s lean years look like?

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, we have seen, predicts national destruction by the year 2038. That’s when the cost of supporting the bulge-generation of Turkish retirees will bankrupt the national Treasury, and when Kurdish speakers will threaten to outnumber Turks in Anatolia.

Turkey was supposed to be the poster child for Muslim democracy. But it is rapidly turning into an Islamist tyranny. In 2002, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, formed the country’s first Islamist government in nearly eighty years. Then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz singled Turkey out as an exemplar of moderate Islam in a September 2002 address.3 The Bush administration gave the AKP party leader Tayyip Erdogan star treatment during a 2003 Washington visit, including a presidential press conference and high-profile meetings at the Pentagon, even though Erdogan was still barred from the prime minister’s office for Islamist pronouncements he had made a decade earlier. When Erdogan was re-elected prime minister in 2007, though, Turkey transmogrified from the West’s (and Israel’s) most reliable ally in the region to a spoiler intent on carving out its own regional role.

Turkey has never been a country so much as a stopping-place for migrations. The Turkish coast was Greek from the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. to the early 1920s, when the million and a half remaining Greeks were expelled. No Turk lived in Anatolia until the end of the eleventh century, when the Seljuk Turks began conquering territory from the Byzantine Empire. The Westernization of Turkey rested on more than Atatürk’s personal vision; it was physically a Western phenomenon, the result of an enormous migration into Turkey from the West. By the end of the First World War, refugees or children of refugees from the collapsed European outposts of the Ottoman Empire—along with Crimean Muslims driven out of Russia—comprised more than a quarter of the 21 million people living within the frontiers of what is now modern Turkey, in the Anatolian rump of the once vast Ottoman territories. The liberation of the Balkans from Ottoman rule and Russian expulsions drove between 5 and 7 million people into Anatolia during the century before the First World War.12 After the war, another half million Muslims were expelled from Greece in the population exchange that settled the Greek-Turkish war. Turkey in turn massacred or expelled 3 to 4 million Armenian and Greek Christians during and after the First World War. Atatürk’s constituency resided on the country’s coast, swollen with Turkish refugees from Western lands, rather than in the backward Anatolian plain.

Atatürk’s secularism defined “Turkishness” as a national identity, emulating the European nationalism of the nineteenth century. The old Ottoman identity had had nothing to do with nationality in the Western sense. It was religious and ethnic. A fifth of the population of Anatolia before World War I was Christian, mainly Armenian and Greek; virtually all were expelled or murdered. The Turks killed more than a million and a half Armenians, employing Kurdish militia to do most of the actual dirty work (that is why what is now “Turkish Kurdistan” was until 1916 “Western Armenia”). The modern Turkish state was born in a bloodbath and founded on massive population shifts. The Kurdish minority that now makes up a fifth to a quarter of the population, depending on definition, got the southeast as a consolation prize but still longs for its own language, culture, and eventual national state. By the turn of the millennium, Kemalist secularism was a grotesque relic of 1930s European nationalism. To the extent that there was some hope of keeping Turkey in the Western camp, though, the Bush administration’s nation-building blunders in Iraq and credulous admiration of “moderate Islam” in Ankara destroyed it. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a monster, but for the Turks a useful monster. The 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq killed up to 180,000 of them, and the crackdown on the Kurds after the 1991 First Gulf War killed as many as a hundred thousand. The Turks, in c...

contrast, killed perhaps only twenty to forty thousand Kurds during the 1980s and 1990s. Turkey in 2003 rejected America’s plan to open a northern front against Saddam out of fear that the war would ruin Turkey’s ability to control its restive border. The destruction of the Iraqi state, moreover, created a de facto independent Kurdish entity on Turkey’s border, the last thing Ankara wanted. If America had simply installed a new strongman and left, Turkey would have been relieved. But America’s commitment to “nation-building” and “democracy” in Iraq, to Ankara’s way of thinking, meant that Iraq inevitably would break up; the Kurdish entity in the north would become a breakaway state; and Iran would come to dominate an Iraq with a Shi’ite majority.

Most of rural Turkey remains stuck in the thick mud of traditional society. A fifth of Turkish marriages are consanguineous (to first or second cousins), about the same level as in Egypt, despite the fact that Turkey’s GDP per capita is double that of Egypt. Traditional prejudice, it appears, prevents most Turkish women from working outside the home. Turkish women have lost rather than gained ground in economic life: only 22 percent of Turkish women sought employment in 2009, down from over 34 percent in 1988, despite better female education and a sharp drop in fertility, that is, better qualifications and greater opportunity. By contrast, 54 percent of South Korean women work. As smallholding agriculture shrinks, women who no longer can work on the family farm simply sit at home.21 Turkey’s official unemployment rate stands around 10 percent; adjusted for the underemployment of Turkish women, the unemployment rate would be above 25 percent.

There are many reasons why Turkey might succeed: its geographical and cultural position and its comparative advantages in the regional market, for example, and its talented and energetic managerial caste. But there is one big reason why Turkey might fail: the Islamists’ attempt to reverse the country’s cultural direction of the past eighty years may provoke an open conflict between the Western and Asian readings of Turkishness and short-circuit the possible solutions. Erdogan is straddling a chasm between Western Turkey and the Anatolian hinterland, secular and religious, Turk and Kurd. His apocalyptic tone is not a symptom of a fragile personality, but rather of a fragile nation.

Muslim culture is tribalism elevated to a universal principle. Islam presents itself as a universal religion, rising above tribe and nation. But in theology as well as practice, Islam sanctifies the petty tyranny of tribal society. This emerges most clearly in the Koran’s defense of wife-beating in Sura 4:34.

All Western political theory places the individual in a social contract with the sovereign, just as biblical religion locates the individual in a covenant with God. The “inalienable rights” of the American Founding derive from a God who grants such rights to every individual by eternal covenant: no king, petty official, or family member can impair them. Islam’s legal system is closer to the pagan model of ancient Rome: the paterfamilias is a “governor” or “administrator” of the family, a miniature sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife. Wife-beating is practiced widely in the Muslim world as well as among Muslim immigrant communities in the West. It is embedded too profoundly in sharia law to be extracted. Nowhere to my knowledge has a Muslim religious authority of standing repudiated wife-beating as specified in Sura 4:34 of the Koran. To do so would undermine the foundations of Muslim society.

This principle of authority trumping individual rights makes Muslim society incompatible with the principle of law in modern liberal democracy, in which the state alone wields the monopoly of violence. Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the pre-modern notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of a family may employ violent compulsion just as the state does.

Execution for domestic crimes, often called “honor killing,” is not explicitly sanctioned by the Koran, but the practice is so widespread in Islam that it is recognized in the law of most Muslim countries. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that five thousand women and girls are murdered annually in the name of family honor. Writing in the Independent in September 2010, Robert Fisk cited estimates from women’s advocacy groups four times as high.9 Muslim courts either do not prosecute honor killings or prosecute them more leniently than other crimes. Article 340 of Jordan’s penal code reads, “He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” Syria imposes only a two-year prison sentence for such killings. Pakistan forbids them but rarely punishes them. Turkish courts regularly reduce sentences for perpetrators. Honor killing, to be sure, is a tribal rather than a Muslim practice, but Muslims are responsible for 84 percent of honor killings in North America and 96 percent in Europe, according to one recent study.10 Hindu honor killings occur, but they number in the dozens per year rather than the thousands in the Muslim world.

Finally there is the matter of arranged cousin marriages. Between a half and three-fifths of all Muslims, depending on the country, marry a first or second cousin. So-called consanguineous marriages pose a high risk of birth defects and naturally worry medical authorities. In the UK, the BBC reports, British Pakistanis—55 percent of whom have consanguineous marriages—account for 3.4 percent of all births, but for 30 percent of all birth defects.