Fertility among Muslims in Today’s World: Key Tendencies and Factors (Overview of Studies and a Case Study)

Abstract

The paper considers the impact of religion on birth rates among Muslim communities of today’s world. The first section contains a brief overview of fertility trends in countries where Muslims constituted the majority by the early twenty‑first century. It is shown that, despite a significant de‑ crease of fertility in those countries, in most of them it has not reached the low levels observed in Europe and North America. Then an overview of studies on fertility among Muslims is offered. These studies mainly consider three hypotheses about the impact of religion upon fertility: the “characteristics hypothesis,” the “norms hypothesis” and the “minorities hypothesis.” Most of these studies show that Islamic norms by themselves are not a factor of higher fertility. Nevertheless, birth rate can be higher in communities where some form of religious ideology plays an impor‑ tant role. At the same time, higher fertility of Muslims is often explained by “traditionalism” in family organization. However, this factor of “fam‑ ily traditionalism” is also valid for other religions. The second section of the paper is a case‑study of a Russian region with a Muslim majority, the Republic of Karachay‑Cherkesia. The analysis of a survey conducted in 2018 shows that higher fertility is associated with some parameters of personal religiosity of women. The survey results are compared with other studies of Muslims in different parts of the world.