The question of why the Middle East has remained socioeconomically and politically underdeveloped in comparison to the West has been a major preoccupation for scholars across generations. A venerable perspective identifies the causes and remedies of underdevelopment in internal dynamics of the countries in the region. As societies achieve economic growth, they gradually develop characteristics conducive to democratization. Detractors challenge this perspective for ignoring international and intranational power asymmetries and inequalities that perpetuate patterns of underdevelopment.

In Demography and Democracy, Elhum Haghighat builds on this modernization perspective and aims to offer a structural explanatory framework to make sense of the contemporary trajectory of Middle Eastern societies (including 18 sovereign states and Palestine in the Middle East and North Africa but excluding Israel). Her main antagonist is Samuel Huntington’s infamous “clash of civilizations” thesis. Like many other scholars before her, Haghighat argues that nothing in Islam makes it inimical to economic and political development. She embraces the notion of “multiple modernities” and argues that religion continues and will continue to remain visible and influential as the Middle East modernizes (in contrast to the experience of some but not all Western countries). She provides a wealth of descriptive statistics to argue that all Middle Eastern countries have been experiencing profound demographic transformations since the late twentieth century. Mortality and fertility rates have declined dramatically, and rich Persian Gulf countries have attracted waves of migrants not only from poorer countries in the region but also increasingly from populous South Asian countries. Furthermore, literacy and access to higher education have increased dramatically even if youth and female unemployment contribute to political instability in most Middle Eastern countries. In addition, some Middle Eastern countries have considerably reduced various aspects of gender inequality, defying the popular image of the region as the bastion of patriarchy.

Haghighat sounds an optimistic tone. Her book suggests that, if we go beyond the headlines with their narrow focus on dramatic events, longer-term demographic and socioeconomic trends in the Middle East appear promising. Yet, her argument has three major shortcomings. First, there is an unresolved tension between the “multiple modernities” approach and the notion of development as articulated in the book. Similarly, the distinction between “modern” and “Western,” which is repeated throughout the book, is conceptually shallow. This ambiguity becomes particularly problematic in her discussion of gender issues. Haghighat devotes considerable space to the ranking and scores of the Middle Eastern countries in the Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the UNDP and the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) of the OECD (pp. 117–31). She rightly observes that modernization in the Middle East entails progress according to these internationally accepted metrics. But, then, what “multiple” modernities can we envision in the region if the measures of development are universal? What are the distinctive characteristics of modernity that set the Middle East apart from the West? These questions remain unaddressed.

Next and relatedly, there is a fundamental difference between arguing that religious beliefs and norms are not an obstacle to political development and arguing that the configuration of social practices according to religious precepts does not hinder fundamental rights and liberties. This distinction between secularization as the decline of religion and secularization as the differentiation of life spheres is the core argument of Jose Casanova’s classic work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994). It is hard to conceive of a democratic system without the latter form of secularization. Yet this distinction is lost in Demography and Democracy. Haghighat’s detailed discussion of SIGI scores shows that family codes; laws against domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment; societal practices concerning the sex of babies; and access to resources and assets are more progressive (i.e., less discriminatory against women) in Turkey than any other Middle Eastern country. It is then probably not coincidental that Turkey also has the most secular legal system in the region.

Finally, Haghighat completely ignores how geopolitical power struggles highly complicate and often undermine the applicability of the modernization perspective to the Middle East. This one-sided approach is most explicit in her case study of Yemen (the others being Qatar, Tunisia, and Iran, even though no sources in Arabic or Persian are included in the bibliography). Adopting a fatalistic tone, she writes that the current predicament of Yemen is “unsurprising” given its underdevelopment, history of civil wars, and large youth population (pp. 170, 221). However, as Isa Blumi’s recent book (Destroying Yemen, 2018) argues emphatically, the underdevelopment of Yemen cannot be made sense of without studying its relations with regional and global powers. The civil war that erupted in 2015 has been an enormous human tragedy that has set Yemen back for decades to come. The bombing campaign and embargo pursued by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and supported by the United States is the most salient preventable factor exacerbating this tragedy. Yet, except for a single paragraph (pp. 171–72), this political situation receives no treatment in Haghighat’s narrative. Similarly, she duly notes the prevalence of high fertility rates in Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine (p. 83) without pondering the political dynamics affecting demographics in these countries. Nor there is any discussion of the effects of climate change on Middle Eastern societies, despite the centrality of these effects to demographics and development.

There are also a significant number of factual errors in the book. Shiites do not make up 74% of the Syrian population (p. 33). The conflation of Shiites and Zaydis in Yemen (p. 34) is highly problematic given their divergent historical evolution. The MENA region does not hold “the majority of the world’s Muslim population” (p. 35): the Muslim population is much larger in South and Southeast Asia. Qatar did not become the host of the 2022 World Cup “through a rigorous selection process” (p. 176): sworn court testimonies reveal that FIFA officials took bribes to support Qatar’s bid. Nor did Qatar remain under Ottoman rule until 1951 (p. 174): the Ottoman Empire had ceased to exist by then. Qatar has a constitution, but that hardly makes it a “constitutional monarchy” (p. 175) with limits to executive power. It is not clear why Qatar would have ranked worse in the Gender Inequality Index (GII) “if Qatari women were heavily employed in blue collar and low-paid employment sectors” (p. 182). After all, an important factor improving a country’s GII score is women’s active participation in the labor force. Homosexuality is not treated as “an illness that can be cured” (p. 138) in Iran: same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death according to Iranian law. If “Iran’s population is projected to grow to close to 100 million by the year 2050” from its 2014 population of 77 million (pp. 152 and 202), how can it also be expected to experience a significant population decline of 41% between 2010 and 2040 (p. 152)?! An Ayatollah is not expected to attain the rank of marja-e taqlid first (p. 229), given that the latter is the title of Grand Ayatollahs who achieve the highest level of religious authority in Shiite Islam.

Overall, Demography and Democracy provides some useful information about various aspects of demographic changes and patterns of development in the contemporary Middle East.

Readers looking for an insightful analysis of political dynamics shaping these changes and patterns, however, are likely to be disappointed.