ARI Working Paper Series

A demographic perspective is relevant to understanding the position of Muslims in today’s world. This paper deals with issues such as the proportion of Muslims who live in countries where Muslims are the great majority of the population (71% live in countries where more than 80% of the population is Muslim); indices of human development, poverty and welfare for Muslim-majority countries; trends in mortality and fertility; and the wide-ranging attitudes of Muslims towards contraception and abortion.

The paper takes issue with the common belief that there is such a thing as “Muslim fertility” – high and always higher than that of neighbouring non-Muslim populations. Fertility rates are actually declining sharply in a number of major Muslim-majority countries, and have fallen below replacement level in Iran. The paper also shows that mortality has declined sharply over the past 15 years in many Muslim countries, though not in all, and that Muslim countries are no longer prominent among the ‘outliers’ with higher mortality than expected on the basis of their income levels. Nevertheless, the legacy of past high fertility rates is a rapidly growing adolescent population and a burgeoning, inadequately educated labour force in many Muslim majority countries, providing conditions in which extremism and violence may breed.

With regard to contraception and abortion, different schools of Islamic jurisprudence have different teachings, but in general, contraception is allowed for reasons of health, economic hardship and social responsibility, and abortion is allowed by some schools. There is often a gulf in perception of the issues between leading jurists and village-level religious leaders. Key words: Islam, demography, fertility, mortality, contraception, human development.