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

by David Goldman

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.