A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World

by Youssef Courbage, Emmanuel Todd, George Holoch (Translator)

Overview

We are told that Western/Christian and Muslim/Arab civilizations are heading towards inevitable conflict. The demographics of the West remain sluggish, while the population of the Muslim world explodes, widening the cultural gap and all but guaranteeing the outbreak of war. Leaving aside the media's sound and fury on this issue, measured analysis shows another reality taking shape: rapprochement between these two civilizations, benefiting from a universal movement with roots in the Enlightenment.

The historical and geographical sweep of this book discredits the notion of a specific Islamic demography. The range of fertility among Muslim women, for example, is as varied as religious behavior among Muslims in general. Whether agnostics, fundamentalist Salafis, or al-Qaeda activists, Muslims are a diverse group that prove the variety and individuality of Islam. Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd consider different degrees of literacy, patriarchy, and defensive reactions among minority Muslim populations, underscoring the spread of massive secularization throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

In this regard, they argue, there is very little to distinguish the evolution of Islam from the history of Christianity, especially with Muslims now entering a global modernity. Sensitive to demographic variables and their reflection of personal and social truths, Courbage and Todd upend a dangerous meme: that we live in a fractured world close to crisis, struggling with an epidemic of closed cultures and minds made different by religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231150033
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2014
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Youssef Courbage is research director at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies. His research concerns Arab and Muslim countries, Asia and Eastern Europe, and interactions among demography and politics. He has studied economics, sociology, demography, and urban planning at Lebanese and French universities.

Emmanuel Todd is a researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and author of numerous books, including After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics, and Culture.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Introduction: Clash of Civilizations or Universal History
1. The Muslim Countries in the Movement of History
2. Crises of Transition
3. The Arab Family and the Transition Crisis
4. Other Muslim Women: East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa
5. At the Heart of Islam: The Arab World
6. The Non-Arab Greater Middle East
7. After Communism
8. Matrilocal Asia
9. Sub-Saharan Africa
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes

Editorial Reviews

This articulate and elegant demographic study convincingly documents a general trend toward modernity in the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia. It successfully refutes many Western prejudices towards Islam, especially those based on misconceptions about its religion. It should be required reading for Western policy makers as well as for the general public.

Léon-François Hoffmann

Scholarly and engaging, this is an important work and one which deserves to be widely read.

Law Society Journal - Sandra Berns

A primer in the demography of Muslim societies, a treatise on the causes and consequences of fertility decline, and a rejoinder to the 'clash of civilizations' argument.

Population and Development Review - John Casterline

I found this succinct book fascinating and recommend it.

Patrick J. Ryan

A positive, enlightening survey.

The Midwest Book Review

This articulate and elegant demographic study convincingly documents a general trend toward modernity in the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia. It successfully refutes many Western prejudices towards Islam, especially those based on misconceptions about its religion. It should be required reading for Western policy makers as well as for the general public.

Léon-François Hoffmann

It's an old trope that Muslim and Western societies are undergoing a "clash of civilizations"—one that this slim study neatly and persuasively rebuts. Courbage and Todd (After the Empire), director and researcher respectively at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, posit that globally, rising literacy rates and dropping birth rates are followed by societal upheaval presaging modernization. The authors present copious data to argue that Muslim societies are on this track that the West has already completed (though "Westerners would like to forget that their demographic transitions were also strewn with many disturbances"). In this time of upheavals across the Muslim world, the authors' predictions appear nearly prophetic—save for their contention that Arab regimes are "likely to be stable for a relatively long time." This is the academic work that remains accessible even to the nonprofessional reader, the book's length allowing brisk reading, but the authors occasionally provide conclusions without quite enough underpinning. At certain points, deeper analysis would have strengthened their case. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Written with clarity and élan.

Review of Middle East Studies

Engaging for a general reader and rewarding for a specialist.... Highly recommended.

Choice

Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd totally recast the current debate about Islam and the West by focusing attention on some societal fundamentals and by debunking-once and for all-a number of myths.

Nicolas Guilhot

ahdjkhueh

Columbia University Press

From the Publisher

This articulate and elegant demographic study convincingly documents a general trend toward modernity in the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia. It successfully refutes many Western prejudices towards Islam, especially those based on misconceptions about its religion. It should be required reading for Western policy makers as well as for the general public.

Leon-Francois Hoffmann

Scholarly and engaging, this is an important work and one which deserves to be widely read.

— Sandra Berns

Law Society Journal

I found this succinct book fascinating and recommend it.

— Patrick J. Ryan

Commonweal

An insightful academic study of how the unrest and turbulence that characterizes large areas of the Muslim world are the results of demographic—rather than ideological—trends.

Researchers Courbage and Todd argue that media-driven doomsday scenarios that pit the Christian West against the Islamic East are as false as they are harmful and misleading. Through careful analysis of demographic data from the Middle East, Central Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, the authors show how such factors as the overall decline in the birth rate and an increase in female literacy are symptoms of "a major anthropological transformation" that points to universal patterns of historical development. Regional differences—caused by dissimilarities in family structures as well as economic, political and theological variables—do not subvert the current demographic transitions the authors believe will lead to the Muslim world's movement into the hyper-plural space of modernity now inhabited by the Christian West.Indeed, the dichotomy between "us" and "them" is false and created largely to hide other, more disturbing realities, such as disparities in income and standards of living. By breaking down the monolith of "Islamic civilization" into individual national units and studying the specific demographics of each, Courbage and Todd give readers a way to think about Muslim society that is both hopeful and enlightened.They offer a vision of a global future in which cultural diversity will no longer be viewed as "a source of conflict" but rather "evidence of the richness of human history."

Challenging and important reading.

Kirkus Reviews