Muslim countries, like other developing ones, face a population explosion and the spectre of deepening unemployment, especially among the youth. In much of the Muslim world fertility began to decline in the 1970s and 1980s, as more women became educated, joined the work force and married later. Figure 3.9 shows that only some of the poorest African states, such as Mali and Niger, experienced little decline in fertility. In others the decline is sharp. The average number of births per woman dropped by 2003 from between 5.5 and 7 in the 1960s to little more than 2 in Indonesia, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, not much more than France's 1.9 births per woman. By the turn of the century women constituted 30 to 40 per cent of work forces of most Muslim countries, except Saudi Arabia. Even so, their populations of youth under the age of twenty five were still projected to be substantially above the wealthier, industrialised countries for the coming quarter of a century. And in most Muslim countries, the youth would still comprise at least 40 per cent of their respective populations in 2030, although the demographic bulge would gradually move up the age ladder under the cumulative impact oflower fertility rates. As Figure 3.10 shows, however, Muslim populations were much younger than those of the UK or the US and the youth bulges of Afghanistan, Yemen and the sub Saharan African countries were not expected to change much.
Muslim youth, however, are no longer just a subservient age category. As Graham Fuller observes, ‘Youth in the developing world is increasingly exposed to a variety of Western ideas about what youth means, even as
38 Tarik M. Youssef, ‘The murabaha syndrome in Islamic finance: Laws, institutions, and politics', in Henry and Wilson (eds.), The politics of Islamic finance, pp. 63 80.
World History
