Islamism, religiosity and fertility in the Muslim world

Eric P Kaufmann, University of London

Will Muslim societies become secular or continue to become more religious? Within the religious majority, are Islamists (supporters of Sharia 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.