Editors. Gavin W. Jones & Mehtab S. Karim

In this anthology, a set of experts in the fields of population, sociology and other social sciences have superbly initiated the exploration and discovery of the often ignored topic of Muslim fertility. Why do most Muslim populations have a higher birth rate than other communities in similar geographic bounds? Why is Turkey’s birth rate higher than neighboring Greece? And how much of a say do Muslim woman have on how and when their uteruses are filled with life? These inquiries leave one fascinated and the book provides insight in understanding numerous other study areas such as gender roles, politics and quality of life among Muslims. It’s certainly not easy to maintain generalizations due to the diversity within Muslim societies as well as the differences in the conclusions affecting Muslim populations.

The book focuses mostly on two thirds of the world’s Muslims which live in Muslim majority countries. The key factors affecting birth rate range from a country’s population policy and laws, attitudes and norms on early marriage, on women in the workforce and towards female anatomy, to the attitude of how family planning administrators view their work. Islam has a key influence in all these factors, and the effectiveness of population control policies lies primarily on whether the country follows a modernist Islam that relies on the independent analysis of Ijtehad or a staunch approach of taqlid’s unquestioned following of traditions. The two choices are predominantly dependent on theist leanings of the mosque preachers and imams at a village level and a more organized political cleric class at the urban level. Many of the countries under study remain well below the poverty line and hence relinquish more control on religion to instruct population trends.

Interestingly, Pakistan was the first Muslim majority country to formulate a population policy that acknowledged the need to lower fertility in the 1960’s followed by other counties like Egypt, Turkey and Iran. However Pakistan remains on the bottom of the list of educational indicators, which has a direct link with the highest infant mortality figures, as well as lowest contraceptive prevalence rate as compared to other Muslim majority countries.

The Deobandi opposition to Pakistan’s population policy was the key factor in the failure of the state to bring the health indicators to an acceptable level, although earlier Deobandi scholars allowed contraception based on early fatwas, but later after Pakistan’s creation turned down the teachings of muftis like Mohammad Shafi, Aziz-ur-Rahman and Maulana Rashid and permeated the pre-partition Muslim-minority complex that advocated “equating number with power.” An even more effective counter to Pakistan’s human development index was Maulana Maudodi’s book, The Birth Control (1969) which argued that birth control was a plot against Islam and was a strategy to promote sexual promiscuity and STD’s. With hardly any juristic basis for his opposition, the text was mostly a lashing out in fear of the breakdown of a patriarchal system that would enable more women to be part of the workforce.

A more practical return-to-the-sources approach however indicates that Islam largely supports family planning, although it relies heavily on traditional methods as opposed to modern ones for the obvious reasons that neither specialized condoms nor pills were common at the time the sources were written. The two key cases that argue for contraception stem from Verse 2: 286 of the Quran which pronounces that no one should be loaded with a burden which he does not have a capacity to carry, and finally that if an act is not prohibited in the Quran or Sunnah then by implication it is permissible under the guise of necessity and capacity.

Further evidence comes from the emphasis on marriage being an institution where the couple is instructed to “dwell in tranquility” and where consent is necessary, which indicates a mature age of marriage not only physically but also socially. This results in a more secular increase in age at marriage in many Muslim countries leading to lower birth rate.

Breast-feeding is a further indication of a policy that favors spacing between children, since the period is extended to at least two years. The Hanafi school even endorses abortions at this stage, provided the pregnancy is ended to preserve the vitality of the suckling child. Most schools of thought apart from the Jafris, have no qualms with abortion as long as they fall within the stage of the fetus before ensoulment takes place, and many scholars agree that 120 days is the right stage when this occurs. The underlying rule of abortions is that it should be to ward off a greater risk, and the mother’s life should take precedence because she is the “giver of life.”

Unlike the general misconceptions about family planning, fertility isn’t a woman-only domain in Islam, rather it is a mutually agreed strategy in a marriage. Even a traditionally orthodox scholar like Imam Ghazali for example, is one of the greatest proponents of azl more commonly known as the withdrawal technique, which he advocates to be used for protecting the wife’s fitness, beauty and health as well as to contain economic hardships that a large family accompanies, disrupting the principle of “tranquility” that is a must in a family and within individual couples. Not only was azl a common practice in the Prophet’s time, had it been illegal, the sources would make it explicitly forbidden. Moreover, all jurists in the four Sunni schools and three Shia schools agree that azl is permitted under the condition that the wife also consents to this method of family planning. Despite Ghazali’s stance on this matter, he is considered widely as the cause of Islam’s downward spiral in Philosophy as opposed to Ibne-Rushd’s forward-looking approach. Many link the East’s decline to Ghazali’s following, and the West’s triumph in modernism and progress to imbibing Ibne-Rushd (Averose)’s ideas.

Fertility trends indicate that large populations don’t necessarily mean a Maulana Maudodi value system is being followed. Indonesia, the largest concentration of Muslims in the world have 1/5th of the women engaging in premarital sex, and a sizable number of women happen to be pregnant at the time of their marriage. This is not shocking because society tolerates consensual sex between mature adults who may not be financially able to carry out a marriage ceremony, but have are united in all other ways.

A classic example of the high level of tolerance for a social marriage is in the concept of mut’a which is a religiously and legally binding contract which is exactly like a marriage except that it is of a limited duration, needs fewer formalities and has limited responsibilities than in a nikaah. It also supports the key concerns of determining parental lineage, since a woman can only have one mut’a contact at a time, whereas a man can engage in multiple. This is a practice clearly formulated to provide a legal framework to the sexual pleasures of society, though it is condemned by a majority of Sunni ulema and feminists alike. The general practice of mut’a in Iran highlights that there can be gaps between religion, cultural norms and personal practices.

Another myth-buster in the book, more relevant for the western audience, is that some Muslim men prove to be even more shockingly tolerant toward family planning than their non-Muslim counterparts. Iranian men, for example have one of the highest rates of vasectomy or male sterilization, which is odd because most developing countries like Iran which the west calls “fanatical” have patriarchal systems of political organization that deem fertility issues to be a woman’s issue. The Ayatollahs actually favored fatwas on contraceptive use soon after the revolution. As with vasectomy, condom use is generally low in Muslim countries because most religious leaders disapprove on the premise that it encourages premarital sex. It is for this reason that many Muslim countries see a distinct lack of awareness of condoms as a method of disease control, in case of HIV/AIDS.

As was the case of birth control methods, the role of women in determining their fertility is also a factor of politics and power established by the clerical class rather than what Islam actually specifies. Many Muslim countries assert that women do not have a right to deny pregnancy or to demand it because pregnancy is God’s will and hence a man has the final say. As blasphemous and undemocratic as that sounds, the reason behind this attitude was largely the education gap between men and women. Often a woman, on the brink of being a girl-child finds herself married off to a man who she has no prior knowledge about, under the concocted rule of ijbar, the right of a father to decide on behalf of the daughter. Although this right cannot be used despotically, the preconditions are often ignored because women cannot demand otherwise.

Other key areas which affects women’s role is divorce and polygamy, both of which are ridiculously tailored to fit men’s whims and not follow the injections of “justice” that the Quran specifies. Under most laws inspired by Muslim law in countries such as Indonesia, a man can easily dispense the contractual marriage by pronouncing the word talaq three times, with no pressure to pronounce reason, but many such laws are being reformed. Now in the same country, a man needs to appear before a court with a valid reason before he is granted judicial approval for the same. Islam gives a woman the right to obtain a divorce/ khula from the courts with or without the approval from any man, based on some validity, but rarely is it as easy as it was intended to be.

Polygamy is another aspect that undermines women’s ability to provide her children with uncompetitive resources and stable emotional support, and it has finds justification in among the Muslim psyche. Although many scholars aver that polygamy is not an ideal situation based on the Verse An-Nisa ‘129 where Allah prohibits a husband from having more than one wife because he will tend to shower attention on one of his wives and ignore the others. If justice is not provided except by monogamy, then monogamy is an obligation to God. Some farfetched claims are made to argue that polygamy favors women because women outnumber men, but as the book points out, rarely are second wives of men in the category of women who don’t find mates i.e. widowed, aged or unattractive. Such men in their arrogance may be “depriving more advantaged young men of better partners.

It is quite clear that Islam is a major factor in determining fertility trends in the Muslim world, especially as it is practiced today in many of the developing Muslim countries where women’s empowerment, education and mobility are low as well as the rates of infant and maternal mortality high. It is perhaps time to ascertain conclusions of the various Islamic conferences covering population, that call for a greater role of women in controlling their fertility, as well as a clerical class that is more aware of the actual teachings of Islam, as opposed to a journalese and politically motivated campaign against family planning.