Summit’s Family-Planning Strategies Worry Muslims

In a dingy suite of offices above the human shouting, bird warbling and airborne feathers of a crowded poultry market, Essam Eryan, a physician and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, sits below a poster of an Earth ensnared by a giant octopus named the United States.

He has to raise his voice slightly to make himself heard.

“What is wrong with big families? My own opinion is: A big family is much better than a small family. It gives a very good chance to bring up children well, to give them a good education in traditions, to reduce selfishness,” Eryan says.

“All the family-planning policy here in Egypt is planned and financed by the Americans,” he goes on. “The responsible way to stop the population problem is to make development and create jobs. So we can welcome the newcomers, not kill them.”

Egypt has about 60 million people and counts 1 million more every year. About 96% of its population is crammed onto the small sliver of green valley that straddles the River Nile. Poor families are stuffed into tenements that rise, bleak and sand-colored, toward a sky fouled by factory and auto emissions. Walking down a Cairo sidewalk is like pushing yourself through a human sieve.

Yet here, where the International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo’s new conference center will try to set a global population strategy next month, a wave of Islamic resistance is mounting on issues of abortion, family relations and sex education that are likely to form some of the cornerstones of the new policy.

Muslim militants around the world are rallying to defeat such a program. They believe it is aimed at stemming the birth of new Muslims while leaving them impoverished, underdeveloped and unprepared to stand as equals in what many see as an impending contest of civilizations between East and West.

“They see the growth of Muslims as a threat to their own interests,” said Fehmi Huweidi, a prominent writer on Islamic affairs in Cairo.

Even the restrained clerics of orthodox Islam have raised a voice of protest, arguing that many of the conference’s frames of reference on family lifestyles, women’s inheritance rights and abortion run counter to the teachings of the Koran.

The debate has heated to a fever pitch in Egypt as the conference approaches. Cairo’s biweekly Al Shaab, the voice of the Labor Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, published a banner headline this week that read: “The Crimes of the Population Conference . . . For the Genocide of Muslims and Oppressed Peoples.”

Venerable Al Azhar University, the seat of religious scholarship for the Muslim world, weighed in with a strongly worded condemnation of language in the conference’s draft action program, which it said conflicts with Islamic teachings on abortion, homosexuality and traditional family values.

“The ambiguous expressions, abstract terms and innovative jargon that abound in it suggest that it aims to adopt the opposite of the basic precepts which Islam has laid down,” Al Azhar complained. “It aims to defend sexual relations which arise between members of the same sex or between different sexes outside legal marriage, which destroys the values to which all revealed religions aspire.”

The debate has created unlikely bedfellows as some of the most prestigious Islamic organizations in the world--the Muslim World League, the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Muslim World Congress--have joined forces with the Vatican to fight for significant changes in the draft action program. It will come up for debate at the conference, which opens Sept. 5, when 20,000 delegates from 191 nations around the world will gather here under the sponsorship of the United Nations.

Islam’s response to the global population crisis will be crucial to any success in curbing human growth. Muslims now make up about 20% of the world’s population, and birthrates, elevated in all Third World countries, are highest in Muslim nations. Islamic birthrates average 2.8%, a figure 22% higher than in most developing nations and many times higher than the overall rate in the developed world.

Yet some Islamic countries, such as Egypt, have been among the forerunners in curbing population growth in recent years. Family-planning clinics, funded in part with large grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, make birth control and reproductive health information available throughout Cairo and in villages in the farthest reaches of rural Egypt.

In 1992 about 47% of all Egyptian women surveyed--in a country where 30% of the women are illiterate--were using birth control as part of a national program that had reduced the overall fertility rate from more than five births per woman in 1980 to 3.9 births.

Other Islamic nations, including Jordan, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Pakistan and Morocco, lead the world in promoting family planning.

Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government is operating one of the most successful family-planning programs in the world after seeing its population growth rate (adjusted from the fertility rate above by factoring in deaths) reach a high of 3.9% in 1985. Now, that has shrunk to less than 2.7% due to a campaign that includes television advertising, sermons, family-planning clinics and free vasectomies and tubal ligation for those who want them.

In both Iran and Egypt, abortion is illegal under Islamic law except to save the life of the mother but is widely and quietly available on the faintest of pretexts. In Egypt, for example, a physician need only certify that terminating a pregnancy was necessary for the mental health of the mother.

Islamic scholars around the world have stood largely united against abortion except to save the mother’s life. Egypt’s grand mufti, the government’s chief cleric, opposed Al Azhar this week and issued a ruling saying abortion might be sanctioned when a pregnancy is caused by rape, incest or, sometimes, in the case of an unwanted pregnancy when a couple has been using contraceptives but is unable to support a child.

“However, the woman should seek abortion the moment she knows she is pregnant,” said the mufti, Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi.

Unlike the Catholic Church, which is campaigning against the twin issues of abortion and family planning, Islam has a history of tolerance for birth control, though it doesn’t encourage it.

Al Azhar has issued five fatwas , or religious rulings, sanctioning birth control since 1937, although permanent sterilization is forbidden except to protect a mother’s life or health.

Al Azhar itself operates four family-planning clinics in Egypt, although the Muslim Brotherhood and nearly all other Islamic charity organizations have shied from any endorsement of birth control.

In statements opposing the conference, Muslim organizations have returned repeatedly to issues of values of terminology, objecting particularly to language urging that teen-agers be educated about sex and AIDS and have access to sexual health care with assurances of confidentiality, plus references to “marriage and other unions” and to “sexually active unmarried individuals.”

“We have seen the results of the West’s sexual revolution and do not want them repeated in the Muslim world,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement on the upcoming conference.

“What we are concerned about is a program that would have agencies, controlled and funded by those of Christian/European heritage, seek to limit the number of ‘brown’ babies through imposition of Western concepts of family planning,” the council said. “Abortion and permanent contraception are seen by Muslims as an attempt to mitigate the effects of a promiscuous lifestyle.”

U.N. officials and others say the proposed program of action seeks not to encourage abortion but to prevent the health hazards of illegal abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies to begin with.

“As a Muslim physician, I wish to assert that the United Nations organization respects the values and traditions of all countries,” said Nafis Sadek, executive director of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities and secretary general of the upcoming conference.

Maher Mahran, Egypt’s minister of state for population and coordinator for the conference in Egypt, said Al Azhar’s statement of opposition was based in part on a misreading of the document, with a faulty translation that in Arabic made it appear that sex education is pornography. “When we mention sex it gives the impression that we are going to educate boys and girls in the techniques of enjoying sex,” he said.

Mahran said Egypt will continue to insist on principles upon which the Koran speaks unequivocally, including any endorsement of homosexuality, which he said is “non-negotiable.”

But Mahran has become the object of scorn in the militant Islamic community in Egypt, which believes the Egyptian government is hosting the international conference and endorsing its principles as a way of currying favor with the West and excusing its own failure to promote successful economic development.

In their view, the upcoming debate must be framed in political and economic terms, not merely scriptural.

“In the Arab world from a regional point of view, you will realize they don’t have any population problem,” said writer Huweidi, noting that the wealthy Arab Gulf nations have been struggling to boost their populations to discourage reliance on foreign labor.

Egypt, he said, has seen its economic growth rate decline from 7% to less than 1.5% in recent years and has tried to blame the resulting problems on population growth, whose major increase has been attributable to a decrease in deaths from disease.

“When we see the problem, we realize the main issue is how to help develop society before imposing family planning on the society,” Huweidi said. “But the government has kept blaming the people, saying you are responsible for your poverty because you had too many children.”

The persistent view heard in Islamic circles is that the West is seeking to curb population growth in the undeveloped world in order to dominate it.

“They pretend that their invitation to stop the growth of populations in Asia, Africa and Latin America is due to their fear of poverty spreading in those areas . . . when they were the ones that stole our wealth and forced economic retardation on us,” said Adel Hussein, editor of As Shaab. “As they killed us in the past with bombs and bullets in order to rule and control us, they now want to kill us and our unborn children for the same purpose.”

Eryan of the Muslim Brotherhood said Muslims will seek a postponement of any decision on population policy until Muslim issues have a chance to be fully aired and debated.