MUSLIM DEMOGRAPHY CONTINUED: polygamy, household size, and population growth

There're 2 more interesting charts in THE ECONOMIST's "POCKET WORLD IN FIGURES", 2005 Edition; Profile Books; London; 2005.

One is "BIGGEST HOUSEHOLDS" (on page 88), and another is "FASTEST GROWING POPULATIONS" (on page 17).

Of the 50 nations with the biggest average household size HALF are mostly Muslim nations - or nations with signficant Muslim minorities. The other half of the nations on the list are almost all African - and NORTH KOREA (and few nations in the South Pacific). Number's 1 & 2 - Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - average more than 8 people in each household; #3 Pakistan averages just over 7/household; #9 Jordan averages over 6/household; #38 Bangladesh averages just over 5/household; #45 Afghanistan averages 5/household.

Of the 20 nations with the fastest growing populations, 15 are mostly Muslim or have significantly large Muslim minorities. Qatar is the fastest growing population - growing at a rate of 9.6%/year! Syria is #19, and growing at 3.68% per year. (CONVERSELY: of the 20 SLOWEST growing populations, only one is Muslim: Afghanistan.)

These two demographic values (hosuehold size and population rate of increase) are related: large households are large because the women in the household are giving birth to many babies - and that OBVIOSULY causes that nation's population to increase!

What is not so obvious is why most of these fast "growing/large household" nations are Muslim. Could it be that POLYGAMY tends to increase the size of each household? That seems very likely. If a man has three wives and each has only two children with him (the average in the USA/household), then the household size - and population growth will be three times greater in the polygamous Muslim nation than the secular Western nation.

If Muslim nations adopted monogamy - this would reduce the size of each household, increase the wealth of each household/person, and reduce the rate of population growth of each mostly Muslim nation. These results would improve the QUALITY OF LIFE for all the citizens of these nations.

And it would increase the individual value of each woman, each wife.

I think that this would reduce "honor killings" - and this would increase the VALUE OF EACH LIFE in these cultures, which would reduce the appeal of jihadoterrorism.

I think that polygamy and misogyny are both expressions of jihadofascism, and I believe that if Muslim nations adopted monogamy and greater empowerment of women that this would eliminate a major "root cause" (or ENABLER) of jihadoterrorism: the systematic dehumanization of half their people - the women; (as I have previously blogged: an ideology which blesses "honor killings" of female family members is certainly going to permit murder and terror of "infidels".) If and when Islam eliminates the former, it can eliminate the latter.

UPDATE: Here are some links to a few articles about Muslim misogyny and its link to polygamy, "honor killings" and jihadoterrorism:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/4/23/184354.shtml
http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/6.24/001128-honor.html
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=244
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000745.html?q=counterrevolution-net/vfr/archives/000745.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/766003/posts
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/10/nhonor10.xml
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/001706.php
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/11/04/MN183529.DTL
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/378

A few of these links are to articles written BEFORE 9/11. Here's an excerpt from one:

... everything the world has learned in the past decade about why some countries develop and others stay mired in poverty shows that women can make all the difference. National standards of living improve -- family income, education, nutrition and life expectancy all rise, and birthrates fall -- as women move toward equality, ... When women's influence increases, these experts explain, it strengthens the moderate center, bolstering economic stability and democratic order. Women might serve as powerful assets in the West's attempt to counter Islamic radicalism. ... for the past 30 years, Islamic extremism has flourished throughout the Middle East. As women have been pushed out of the political and economic spheres, their traditional moderating role has declined. "This is the warriors' time," said Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "The warriors, the martyrs -- they're all men. In this moment of history, with the world of the Arabs and the larger world of Islam on the boil, the whole question of women and women's progress is shelved." Angry young men, many of them unemployed, have seized the public arena from Algeria to South Asia and filled it with hate, intolerance and the abuse of women, Ajami said. "This is the class that is most hostile to women," Ajami said. "If this class dominates the Islamists, feminism and modernity are doomed." "The issue of gender is so crucial to progress and modernity," he said, "But if the cult of the martyr and the children of the stones on the West Bank, if that's the dominant cult, then what little place there was for women is shrinking."

[From an article by Barbara Crossette, and published in The New York Times - Sunday, November 4, 2001 - three weeks after 9/11.]

In this post - and my prior one on gender imbalances in Muslim countries - I have tried to argue that widespread misogyny and polygamy have had (and continue to have) a profound effect on socio-economic conditions in Muslim nations (probably as much a negative effect as anything else - the barbaric and backward practices derived from Islam's anti-female cultural attitudes contribute to their nation's poverty and ignorance) and their tolerance of tyranny, AND to their propensity for domestic and international violence. If and when Islam banishes polygamy and punishes misogyny, then Islam can end jihadofascism and jihadoterrorism.

UPDATE: click here to read more about misogyny in Saddam's Iraq.

UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR AN ARTICLE BY AYAAN HIRSI ALI ON MISOGYNY IN ISLAM - FROM TODAY'S WSJ! EXCERPT: In every society where family affairs are regulated according to instructions derived from the Shariah or Islamic law, women are disadvantaged. The injustices these women are exposed to in the name of Islam vary from extreme cruelty (forced marriages; imprisonment or death after rape) to grossly unfair treatment in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. I have argued - in this post and a prior one - that Islam's cruel gender discrimination shows up in demographic data, and that this is a root cause of jiahoterror, arguing that if Muslims believe it is good to murder female family members, then of course they can commit terror agaisnt "infidels."

AND READ THIS NOW! (A post FROM A YEAR AGO - by Athena of TERRORISM UNVEILED. And this at OTB.

And... ROGER L. SIMON AGREES: "Women's rights are the very center of the War on Terror. In fact I would argue Islamofascism at its core is more than anything else an expression of rage against women and that Islam itself is not much better on that score."