Swimming against the current: Emmanuel Todd on Islam and the West

In his new book 'Le Rendez-vous des civilisations', French demographist, sociologist, historian and political scientist Emmnanuel Todd, with fellow scientist Youssef Courbage, prove, with scientific data based on demographics, birth rates, education, and some other factors studied by demographists, that Islam is a religion moving toward secularisation, as other religions did before.

This is an excerpt from an interview with Todd published in the French magazine Marianne, and translated in Truth.org.

"Iran worries some observers more than Iraq did before the American intervention.

The question of Iran presents itself in the form of a stream of images and facts difficult to interpret as seen from France. There are the absurd statements of President Ahmadinejad, images of women covered in black and the ambient Islamophobia. All that masks the deep reality of Iran: a society in the midst of rapid cultural development, in which there are more women than men enrolled in university, a country in which the demographic revolution has reduced the number of children per woman to two, as in France or the United States. Iran is in the process of giving birth to a pluralistic democracy. It's a country where, certainly, not everyone can stand for election, but where people vote regularly and where swings in opinion and majority are frequent. Like France, England and the United States, Iran has lived through a revolution that is stabilizing itself and where a democratic temperament is blossoming.

All that must be related to a religious matrix in which the Shiite variation of Islam values interpretation, debate and, ultimately, revolt.

For a simple Western observer, the similarity between Shiism and Protestantism is not particularly obvious.

It would be ridiculous to push this comparison to the extreme. But it is clear that - just as Protestantism was an accelerator of progress in European history and Catholicism was a break - Shiism today brings a positive contribution to development, notably in the domain of birth control: Azerbaijan, certainly post-Communist, but also Shiite, has a 1.7 fertility rate, while the Shiite Alawite regions of Syria have completed their demographic transition, unlike the majority-Sunni regions. In Lebanon, the Shiite community, Hezbollah's social base, was behind on the educational and social levels, but is in the process of catching up with the other communities, as one sees in the development of fertility rates.

Iran is also a very big nation that demonstrates a realistic awareness of its strategic interest in a region where most of its neighbors possess the nuclear weapon: Pakistan, (and, via the presence of the American Army) Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel. In that context, the reasonable European attitude would be to accompany Iran in its liberal and democratic transition and to understand its security preoccupations.

In your book, you make the altogether surprising hypothesis of a possible secularization of Muslim societies.

To the extent that within the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Buddhist worlds, the drop in fertility has always been preceded by a weakening of religious practice, one must wonder whether the Muslim countries in which the number of children per woman is equal to or less than two are not also in the process of experiencing, unknown to us - and perhaps also unknown to their leaders - a process of secularization. That's the case of Iran."

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Also: Secularism and Islamism in the Arab World (thanks Issam)