Until the nineteenth century, the Middle East experienced a typical Malthusian demographic system: high fertility outpaced high mortality, but there was occasional extraordinary mortality from warfare, famine, or epidemic disease, particularly bubonic plague. The population grew slowly until one of these demographic crises occurred, dipped sharply, then Page 1843  |  Top of Article
Children attend school in Baghdad, the heterogeneous capital city of Iraq. The population of Baghdad is nearly five million, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the country's total population. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
began to grow slowly once again. This pattern ended in much of the Middle East during the nineteenth century. Despite minor outbreaks, truly catastrophic epidemics ended with the cholera epidemic of 1865. The increase in central government control facilitated security, trade, and delivery of food to famine regions. Egypt's population began to grow early in the century, as did that of Anatolia and the coastal provinces of Ottoman Syria during the 1870s. Iraq, Arabia, and Iran took little part in either the improvement in civil conditions or population growth.

The period of World War I (and the wars in Anatolia that followed it) was a demographic water-shed in the Middle East, a period of great mortality and forced migration unequalled in the previous millennium. After the war, the Middle East began a new period of population growth, erasing the wartime population losses within a decade. Turkey's population began to expand fairly rapidly, from 14.6 million in 1927 to 18 million in 1940. Egypt's population grew from 13 million inhabitants in 1917 to 16 million in 1937. Other countries grew less quickly, but population increased markedly across the region. Nevertheless, the Middle East can be described as underpopulated before World War II. Large areas of potentially fertile lands were uncultivated. Population density was low, due to high mortality and lack of developed resources. By modern standards, mortality had declined only slowly. In late Ottoman times, mortality had averaged more than 3.5 percent per year. This condition only gradually improved between the two world wars. However, Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey managed to lower mortality through irrigation, public sanitation, and by ending conditions of civil unrest that had diminished the distribution of crops and goods. Medical improvement was a minor factor.

Population of the Middle East, 1800 to 2025, in millions* SOURCE: Projections to 2000 and 2025 from United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2000. (medium-fertility variant) TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP

After World War II, as in much of the world, the Middle Eastern population began to increase rapidly. Fertility, always high, remained so, while introduction of modern medicine greatly lowered mortality. Modern agricultural techniques and the new crops of the green revolution increased the ability of Middle Eastern economies to feed larger populations. The result was a population boom. From 1950 to 1990 the population of the Middle East increased threefold. By the 1960s the rate of population increase meant that, if the high rates continued, future populations would double every twenty-five years. These rates of increase put great strain on the economies of the region. The results have included rapid and unplanned urbanization
Life expectancy at birth* SOURCE: United Nations, World Population Prospects, 1990; World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2002. TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.

and unemployment, as well as overuse of fertilizers and poor agricultural techniques that temporarily yield large crop increases but eventually exhaust the soil.

The average fertility of Middle Eastern women changed little for centuries. Women who lived through their childbearing years (many did not) could expect to have six to seven children (the total fertility rate). Since the late 1970s fertility decreased in most countries. By 1999 the average woman in Turkey had 2.4 children, in Egypt 3.3, in Iran 2.7. However, in Syria and Saudi Arabia, the average remained very high, at 4.6 per woman. Women in Yemen and Oman had 6.2 children on average. Contraceptive usage varies greatly: in 1999, more than 60 percent of Turkish women used some form of contraception at some time in their lives; in Jordan, 27 percent. In some other countries the figures were much lower. Despite recent reductions, the Middle East remains one of the highest fertility regions in the world.

The history of high fertility has strained the capacity of the Middle Eastern economies. Nearly one-half of the population in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen is children under age fifteen. Even Middle Eastern countries with lower fertility, such as Turkey, have populations in which one-third are under fifteen. (This compares with 21 percent in the United States and 20 percent in Western Europe.)

If present fertility trends continue, future Middle Eastern populations will divide into two very different patterns. Israel is already nearing a European pattern of low fertility. Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, the Emirates, and Turkey are approaching that standard. Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others still retain high fertility. The demographics of the latter countries will in fifty years look very different from those of the former, with very large numbers of children and a fast-growing population. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia taken together had a slightly smaller population than Turkey. If trends continue, in fifty years they will together have twice as many people as Turkey.

Fertility and mortality, 1980–1999 SOURCE: World Bank, Development Indicators, 2001. TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.

In the absence of extraordinary causes, fertility would have always outstripped mortality in the traditional Middle East. The population would have risen at approximately 1 percent per year. In fact, epidemics, wars, and famines meant that mortality equaled fertility. The most common causes of death were gastrointestinal diseases. Infant mortality was particularly high, with more than 40 percent of children dying before their first birthday, more than half before age five. Epidemics of plague and cholera caused temporary high mortality. In Egypt, for example, cholera took more than 100,000 lives in each of the epidemics of 1855 and 1865 and almost 200,000 in 1831. Bubonic plague took 500,000 lives in 1835 alone.

Warfare also caused great mortality in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman wars with Russia were particularly deadly for both military and civilian populations. From the beginning of the Balkan Wars in 1912 to the end of fighting in the Turkish War of Independence in 1922, the region suffered some of the worst wartime mortality in history. The highest death rates were found in eastern Anatolia—the result of war between the Ottomans and Russians and conflict between Muslims and Armenians in western Anatolia after the Greek invasion and in Palestine. In Anatolia, 3.8 million died (22 percent), and in Palestine 50,000 (6 percent). In all those conflicts, starvation and disease took a higher toll than did actual battle. Lebanon also suffered mass starvation during the war.

After World War II, the rapid introduction of modern medicine, public sanitation techniques, and agricultural improvements reduced mortality rates sharply. In 1950 the Middle East had a high crude death rate (deaths divided by total population) of more than 2.3 percent a year, but by 1999 it had fallen to less than 0.6 percent a year. Some countries, such as Egypt (0.7 percent in 1999) and Yemen (1.2 percent in 1999) lagged behind. A major part of the postwar improvement came in infant mortality. In 1950 one in five Middle Eastern children died before age five; in 1999 only one in nineteen died before age five, compared to a world average of one in thirteen.

The Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian and
Tenement housing in Cairo, Egypt. Estimates of Cairo's population vary from 8 to 12 million as of 2003. A population explosion that began in 1952 has resulted in overcrowding, scarce housing, unemployment, and health concerns. © TOM NEBBIA/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. Page 1846  |  Top of Article
Istanbul is Turkey's largest city, boasting a population of over ten million as of 2000 and an annual increase of 3.45 percent due to migration from the countryside. One of every six Turks lives in Istanbul, contributing to a population density of 1,700 persons per square kilometer. © YANN ARTHUS-BERTRAND/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
Iraqi soldiers, with consequent effects on the size and gender structure of both populations. In addition, it is estimated that the Baʿthist regime in Iraq killed some three hundred thousand of its own citizens during campaigns against the Kurds in the north of the country and against the Shiʿa in the south.

The United Nations has lowered its projections of the region's population growth to 2025 as a result of the faster than expected decline in fertility. This has translated into slower population growth rates starting in Egypt and spreading east. The absolute increases in population are still growing in many countries because of past fast growth rates, and it will take ten to twenty years for slower growth rates to translate into smaller absolute increases.

Refugee migrations have been a major demographic factor during the past two centuries. Only the most prominent population transfers can be mentioned here: During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, great population movements took place as direct results of Russian imperial expansion in the Crimea and Caucasus and of nationalistic movements among the Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Russia expelled or caused the migration of approximately 1.2 million Circassian, Abhazian, and Laz Muslims from the lands of the Eastern Black Sea. Of these, 800,000 survived and most eventually settled in what today is Turkey, as did the 300,000 Crimean Tatars forced to emigrate during the 1850s and 1860s. A sizable group of the Circassians were settled in the Arab world. Russian expansion also fostered a century-long population exchange, with much attendant mortality, between the Turks and Kurds of Russian Transcaucasia and the Armenians of Ottoman Anatolia and Iran. Between the 1820s and 1920s, 500,000 Armenians and 400,000 Muslims (not including the CircassiansPage 1847  |  Top of Article and Abhazians) crossed the borders. During World War I, an estimated one million Muslims were internal refugees in Eastern Anatolia; an estimated 275,000 Armenians were deported to or were refugees in the Arab world, and 135,000 were refugees in Europe and the Americas.

Nearly 600,000 Turks (40 percent of its Turkish population) were surviving refugees from the new state of Bulgaria after the Russian–Ottoman Wars of 1877–1878. Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro expelled to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace 414,000 Turks during and immediately after the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. During World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed, more than one million Greeks from Anatolia and eastern Thrace went to Greece and 360,000 Turks from Greece to Turkey. Up to 1.5 million Turks were internal refugees within Anatolia and eastern Thrace during the Greek-Turkish war.

Before World War II a major immigration of primarily European Jews swelled the Jewish population of Palestine from 60,000 in 1918 to 600,000 in 1946. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were refugees in the Arab-Israel War of 1948. Between 1948 and 1975, 1.6 million Jews came to Israel. Half of these were from the Middle East and North Africa, another third from Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans. Immigration to Israel has continued recently with nearly one million Jews from Russia and successor states.

The only Middle Eastern country to be heavily affected by refugees from the Afghan War was Iran, which accepted more than two million Afghan refugees. Turkey took in 300,000 ethnic Turkish refugees from Bulgaria, as well as Iranian refugees after the Iranian revolution and Kurdish refugees after the Gulf War. Many of the refugees to Iran and Turkey have been repatriated or have moved to other countries. A significant number of the refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Bulgaria have returned home at least once, only to leave once again when economic and political conditions changed.

The quest for employment has been a major cause of migration into and from the Middle East. In Ottoman times, 175,000 Turkish emigrants went to the United States from 1869 to 1914. More recently,
Drought, hunger, and over two decades of war forced over one million Afghan refugees—mostly women and children—to seek shelter in neighboring countries. In 2002, a massive program undertaken by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, and the governments of the affected countries helped relocate some 1.8 million Afghans back to their home country. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
the International Labor Organization estimated that 1.8 million Turks were working in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium in 1988. During the same year, 20,000 Koreans, 50,000 Indonesians, and 90,000 from the Philippines worked in the Gulf states. Before the Gulf War, up to two million foreign workers, mainly Egyptians, worked in Iraq.

Urbanization has been the most significant factor in internal migration in the modern Middle East. Driven by population pressure in rural areas, the urban population increased from twenty-one million (27 percent urban) in 1950 to 185 million (60 percent urban) in 1999. There is considerable variance between countries: In 1990, Syria's population was only half urban, Egypt's less than half urban, while the populations of Iraq and Turkey were more than 60 percent urban. Istanbul was one of the twenty largest cities in the world. Smaller countries such as Israel and Lebanon were as urbanized as Europe or North America.

A census by definition registers the entire population at one time. Prior to 1882 no real census was taken in the Middle East. In the place of censuses,Page 1848  |  Top of Article the Ottoman and Egyptian governments made compilations of registration data. The registers were lists of inhabitants by household in each village, taken by government officials. These often produced surprisingly accurate counts of the population, especially in areas that were under close governmental control. On occasion, the central governments of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire ordered general updates and compilations of the registers. During the 1860s the Ottoman government began to publish population numbers in the salnames (yearbooks) of its provinces. The Ottoman compilations usually listed data by sex and religion only, even though age-specific figures were kept and are available in archives. The 1313 Istatistik-i Umumi ("1895 General Statistics") was the only Ottoman publication to include data by age group. Population data was collected sporadically in Iran, but was not published officially.

The first real census in the Middle East was taken by the khedival government in Egypt just prior to the British occupation in 1882. Under British statistical influence, Egypt published censuses in 1897, 1907, 1917, 1927, and 1937. The British also undertook a limited form of census in Aden (later People's Democratic Republic of Yemen) in 1881, then published other counts of Aden, as part of the censuses of India, in 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921, and 1931. The Turkish republic began a modern census
Middle Eastern censuses after World War II TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.

program with censuses in 1927 and 1935, followed by censuses every five years. The British Mandate government in Palestine took fairly accurate and very detailed censuses in 1922 and 1931, and with limited success updated the census data through birth and death records and published the data in the Palestine Blue Books. The French collected data in Syria and Lebanon, but only published brief summaries that indicate poor recording. An incomplete census was taken in Lebanon in 1942–1943.

Modern Middle Eastern censuses have routinely been supplemented by publications of detailed information on marriage, divorce, birth, and death, although these often have been accurate only for urban areas. Sample surveys of the population, often supported by the United Nations or other international bodies, have also been published.