MER Article Water and Women As the year 2000 approaches, humanity has passed an important milestone, one that has nothing to do with the new Millennium, but which may have many more consequences than the Y2K bug. On October 12, the world’s population officially passed six billion. While pundits debated whether this was cause f Sally Ethelston • 14 min read
MER Article Urban Planning and Growth in Cairo Descriptions of Cairo are dominated typically by the stark imagery of an extremely concentrated population mass near asphyxiation. From this perspective, one need look no further than its inhabited rooftops, its streets choked with traffic and pollution and its crowded cemeteries, where the living r Eric Denis • 12 min read
MER Article Demographic Change in the Arab World Two of the most populous Arab countries, Egypt and Morocco, lie far apart in geography, in their histories and in the size of their populations. Egypt has 57 million inhabitants, more than twice as many as Morocco’s 25.5 million. [1] One thing they do share is a dramatic long-term rate of demographi Youssef Courbage • 12 min read
MER Article Devices and Desires The development of population policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran provides fertile ground for reexamining the widely held assumption that Islamist ideology is the antithesis of modernity and surely incompatible with any form of feminism. Recent strategies that the Islamic Republic has adopted to Homa Hoodfar • 22 min read
MER Article From Demographic Explosion to Social Rupture Experts and politicians seem to agree that the demographic structures of the Arab countries have reached a critical point. They acknowledge that rapid population growth seriously constrains a country’s economy and, consequently, its social and political possibilities. In the relationship between consumption, savings and investment, demographic imbalance imposes an Philippe Fargues • 14 min read
MER Article Gender, Population, Environment Miryam lives with her family in Manshiyat Nasir, originally a squatter settlement at the foot of Cairo’s Muqattam hills, now largely a brick-built community of small apartment buildings and box-like single family homes. Most now have piped-in water and electricity. Her family is one of the thousands Sally Ethelston • 8 min read
MER Article From the Editors (September/October 1994) The question of population and development needs to be framed first and foremost as a question of equity. The articles in this issue address explicitly the matter of gender equity in families and societies, in ways that challenge the notion that Middle Eastern birth and fertility rates can be neatly The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article The Challenge of Population Growth in Morocco About 30 years ago, a World Bank economic survey mission concluded that “Morocco will continually find itself having to run faster in order to stand still.” [1] A few years later, a Moroccan demographer warned that if the population were to continue to grow at current rates, “all efforts at developm Georges Sabagh • 14 min read
MER Article Migrants, Workers and Refugees The outset of the Gulf crisis in August 1990 saw a dramatic exodus of more than a million Asian and Arab workers as well as some 460,000 Kuwaitis from Iraq and Kuwait. Perhaps a million Yemenis felt compelled to leave Saudi Arabia. During the civil war in Iraq that followed the ground war, a million Michael Humphrey • 13 min read
