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The west's inexorable and irresistable influence on islam
According to a familiar stereotype, Europeans have lost the long term vision that would make them want to have large families, and religion no longer provides such an incentive: the closer a woman lives to Rome, the fewer children she has. In just the last thirty years or so, Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Algeria's fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to 1.75, Tunisia's from 6 to 2.03, Morocco's from 6.5 to 2.21, Libya's from 7.5 to 2.96. Today, Algeria's rate is roughly equivalent to that of Denmark or Norway; Tunisia's is comparable to France. Counter-intuitively, that remark about "the closer to Rome" also holds good on the southern, Muslim, side of the Mediterranean. Just what is happening here? Everything depends on the changing attitudes and expectation of the women in these once highly-traditional societies. Demography is destiny. The first commandment in the Bible: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2011-04-05 |
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