The Rebellion of Muslim Women May Defeat the Third Jihad

I'VE BEEN reading an interesting book called How Civilizations Die and have come across some surprising facts. The book was published in 2011 and uses very recent population and birth rate data. Here's the bottom line: Women in Muslim countries are helping the counterjihad by not having many children. They are undermining orthodox Muslims by denying them soldiers. Here are some passages from the book:

In November 2010 President Ahmadinejad demanded that Iranian girls marry at the age of sixteen and produce more children... For years, Ahmadinejad has denounced Iran's falling birth rate as a Western conspiracy to hobble his country...In 2006 he declared that Iran's population should nearly double: "I am against saying that two children are enough..."

But Iranian women are doing the opposite of what Ahmadinejad asked. Back in 2006, when he first discovered the supposed Western plot to depopulate his country, Iranian women were having two children on average. By 2010 their fertility had dropped to only 1.7 children. Among the Persians who make up just over half of Iran's people — the rest are Turkish-speaking Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis — fertility is even lower. And in Iran's urban centers, there are even fewer births. In Tehran, the nation's capital, fertility is just 1.5 children per woman.

A country needs a birth rate of 2.1 just to maintain its population at the current level.

This same phenomenon is happening in other places in the Muslim world where women are literate. And the higher the literacy rate, the lower the birth rate. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has also pleaded with Turkish women to have more children. In a speech to an audience of women, he asked them to each have at least three children. They ignored him. "Erdogan asked women to have three children, and the demand for contraceptives went up," complained a well-known Turkish academic.

This trend is following Muslims into the Western world. Here's more from the book:

In Germany, for example, Turkish women had on average two more children apiece than German women in 1970. But by 1996, the gap had narrowed to a one-child advantage for the Turks. Muslim women in Austria bore an average of 3.1 children each in 1981, almost double the 1.7 fertility rate for Catholic Austrians. Twenty years later, in 2001, the Catholic fertility rate was down to 1.3, but Muslim fertility had fallen to 2.3. In Holland, Turkish immigrant women were at a fertility rate of 3.2 children in 1990, double the Dutch fertility rate of 1.6. But by 2008, Turkish women in Holland were having only 1.9 children apiece. And in Denmark, the fertility of native-born women reached 1.9 in 2009, against 1.6 for immigrant women. (The figure for Danish women, though, includes second-generation immigrants.)

The pattern also appears to apply to African Muslim immigrants to France, which takes in more immigrants from Muslim Senegal than from any other country in sub-Saharan Africa. Although Senegal's total fertility rate of 5.2 (four children in cities and six children in the countryside) is one of the world's highest, Senegalese immigrants average only 2.12 children, slightly higher than the French average..."

We sometimes fix our attention on the influence orthodox Muslims are having on our culture while overlooking the fact that our culture is also having an influence on the Muslims who move to developed nations.

The more educated the women, the fewer children they bore. The key element is literacy. Literacy reduces both population and fundamentalism (orthodoxy).

All this leads to the inevitable conclusion that if you want to do something to stop the demographic jihad, you should pour your efforts into helping Muslim women become literate, and you should get on it now.

The Girl Effect helps educate young women (read more about the Girl Effect here). While there are many organizations dedicated to literacy for girls, most of them don't work in Muslim lands. But the Girl Effect does.

If you've had trouble talking to some of your friends and family about Islam (trying to get them concerned about the third jihad) I suggest you switch tactics with the resistant ones. Stop talking about Islam with them and promote the Girl Effect instead. Promote literacy for women. Become a fanatic about it. They'll be so relieved, they will gladly join your new cause just to stop hearing you talk about Islam. They never need to know that all their efforts are doing exactly what you've always wanted.