Muslim youth bulges exceed 20 percent and fuel Islamist movements

Evidence

As the Resurgence got under way in the 1970s and picked up steam in the 1980s, the proportion of youth (that is, those fifteen to twenty-four years of age) in major Muslim countries rose significantly and began to exceed 20 percent of the total population. In many Muslim countries the youth bulge peaked in the 1970s and 1980s; in others it will peak early in the next century (Table 5.1). The actual or projected peaks in all these countries, with one exception, are above 20 percent; the estimated Saudi Arabian peak in the first decade of the twenty-first century falls just short of that. These youth provide the recruits for Islamist organizations and political movements. It is not perhaps entirely coincidental that the proportion of youth in the Iranian population rose dramatically in the 1970s, reaching 20 percent in the last half of that decade, and that the Iranian Revolution occurred in 1979 or that this benchmark was reached in Algeria in the early 1990s just as the Islamist FIS was winning popular support and scoring electoral victories. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 322

Categorization

• QUESTION: Did the 2011 Arab Spring confirm or complicate this 1996 prediction about youth-bulge-driven Islamist politics?