Islamism, Religiosity and Fertility in the Muslim World

Religious politics, in which there is a dominant cleavage separating believers (especially if literalist) from moderate believers and nonbelievers is important in Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Will Muslim societies become secular or continue to become more religious? Within the religious majority, are Islamists (supporters of Shari’a Law) more fertile than non-Islamist Muslims? How are these trends affected by modernization? Social scientists have not been very attentive to the role that demography notably fertility and migration plays in the secularization/religious revival story. Work on religious fertility in Muslim countries is particularly scarce. This paper summarizes existing work, then analyzes data from the World Values Survey of 1999-2000, supplemented by the Youth, Emotional Energy, and Political Violence survey of 2005 in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It performs multivariate analysis on three dependent variables: fertility, Islamism and religiosity, to provide a glimpse into the demographic future of Islamism, moderate Islam and secularism in the Muslim world. Paper prepared for 2009 ISA conference, New York