Seemingly simple events like home buying get entangled in Turkey’s escalating tussle between secularism and religion.

But monogamy is more than a cultural preference, it can be a stabilizing factor in growing populations. 

Compared to the Arab world, Turkey’s annual growth is moderate and family size is declining. 

Turkey’s 2012 birth rate dropped to an all-time low of 0.12%, despite urging by Prime Minister Erdogan (himself a father of four) that married Turks produce four or five children. Population topped 75 million last year, but median age crept over 30 as women are having fewer children. Refer to the graph from the World Bank, below, updated in April 2013.

So who’s house-hunting? Turk nationals, and increasingly, foreigners seeking holiday property and speculative investment, with demand particularly rising among Arabs. Middle East nations that allow Turks to buy property within their borders are extended reciprocal rights which allow their citizens to purchase in Turkey.  Establishing a foothold in the country is especially attractive given Turkey’s looming membership in the European Union.

During the first 10 months of 2013, 15,000 foreigners including Russians, Germans and Brits snapped up 21,691 Turkish properties. But sales to Arabs will surpass all others, according to Hurriyet Daily News. Records indicate that 773 properties have been sold to Saudis, with additional sales to Iraqis, Kuwaitis, United Arab Emiratis, and Jordanians.

Some of those buyers have up to four wives, all of whom want a front door key.

Statistics defining the percentage of Arabs with multiple wives are not easily obtained; the tradition varies per nation and age group. There’s a Facebook page called “We want them Four” for supporters of the practice, indicating its enduring appeal to younger men.

The Ministry of Environment and Urban Affairs are reportedly working to resolve the one-resident-wife issue. “Many Arab men say they want to buy in Turkey, but also ask for help to bring all of their wives,” said Hamit Demir, chairman of Demir Construction. He sees the regulation as limiting exploitation of the Arab buyer market.

Ferhat Bakgör, chairman of Bak Construction, which develops property in Istanbul for wealthy Arabs, views it another way, “Turkish people have not yet become comfortable with living with Arab people in same apartment blocks. They will feel worse if Arab men come to Turkey to live with their all wives,” he said.

The Qur’an permits (but does not command) a man to have four wives, but stipulates that each wife must be equally maintained and provided with separate living accommodation.

If the government can finesse the residency permits without aggravating anti-Islam sentiment, the real winner will be Turkey’s realtors.

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The world population hits seven billion and the Middle East is playing its role with one of the fastest growing cities on earth

According to UN estimates the world population will reach seven billion today. It’s a pretty big feat considering that we hit six billion a little over a decade ago and the world population at the birth of Christ was just two hundred million. To mark this milestone, Foreign Policy have put together a list of the seven fastest growing cities in the world and it turns out that the capital city of Yemen, Sana’a, is one of them.

Political Instability & Population Boom

It’s been a tumultuous year for Yemen, which has seen daily shellings and protests calling on the current president Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign. Even so, the capital city of Sana’a is witnessing a population boom with inhabitants now reaching 1.7 million people.  Although the city is not the safest place to live, many choose to stay there as facilities are better in contrast to the rural areas of the country.

Yemen is believed to be one of the poorest nations on earth with many residents heavily dependent on money sent to them from relatives working abroad. Poor education and taboos against birth control also mean that the growth rate is at around 5 percent annually. Nearly half of all Yemenis live under the poverty line and more than 50% of children are said to be malnourished.

UNDP: Severe Water Shortages in Yemen

Tawakul Karman, who was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has spoken in the past about the need for better education and women’s right in the country.

As well as being economically poor, the country is also resource poor. There is a severe lack of water according to officials from the U.N. Development Program and dwindling oil supplies mean the country can’t afford to finance desalination like other richer Gulf nations. Indeed, Sana’a is on route to be the world’s first waterless capital.

Consumption vs. Population

Whilst the MENA region population is expected to rise from 423 million (2007) to 800-900 million by the end of the 21^st century, there isn’t a direct link between our ability to deal with climate change and population numbers. As I have written in the past, mitigating climate change is more about dealing with the (unfair) consumption of the earth’s resources.

For example, one American produces the same emissions as 250 Ethiopians- as such it’s rather hypocritical for us to be asking others to limit families whilst we consume the same as a small African village.  The issue is more about consumption and trying to make it fairer. As Tafline points out in another article, the earth does have the resources to feed even 10 billion people, we just need to stop wasting food and eating so much meat whilst other barely scrape together a meal a day.

:: Image via Island Spice/flickr.

For more on Yemen see:

Millions Go Hungry In Yemen, Syria and Libya

Yemen Running Dry As Water Shortages Reach Extreme Levels In MENA

Arab Spring Female Wins Nobel Peace Prize

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With 7 billion people consuming the earth’s dwindling natural resources, a rising number that is rapidly reaching proportions that could collapse the planet, the question of artificially prolonging human life with technology remains a sticky one. If given the choice between letting a loved-one die in the face of a devastating accident or illness, or saving them with some kind of technological intervention, most sentient people would choose the latter. That’s human.

But where do we draw the line? Tel Aviv University researchers have created a technology that allows two-way brain to computer interaction – when previously only one-way communication was possible – taking the conversation to a whole new level. Matti Mintz successfully got a rat’s damaged brain to communicate with an artificial cerebellum, restoring the rodent’s disabled motor function and ushering in the possibility that a similar gadget could restore brain function to stroke victims or people with other brain injuries. This makes us wonder: in what way is technology changing what is means to be a “natural human being.”

The cerebellum is a cue ball-sized part at the back of the brain that controls motor function. When it is damaged, people lose their ability to send accurate or timely messages from the brain to the body and vice versa, which frequently results in loss of balance and other motoring problems.

A Professor of Psychobiology, Mintz and his team built a computerized cerebellum that recreates how real rat brains send signals from the brain to the body and back. This was then attached to the disabled rat brain.

New Scientist reports:

To test the chip, [the scientists] anaesthetised a rat and disabled its cerebellum before hooking up their synthetic version. They then tried to teach the anaesthetised animal a conditioned motor reflex – a blink – by combining an auditory tone with a puff of air on the eye, until the animal blinked on hearing the tone alone. They first tried this without the chip connected, and found the rat was unable to learn the motor reflex. But once the artificial cerebellum was connected, the rat behaved as a normal animal would, learning to connect the sound with the need to blink.

This is a revolutionary breakthrough that has far-reaching consequences. Although much still needs to be learned about how the cerebellum sends signals in human brains, and all kinds of ethical obstacles will have to be overcome in order to apply this technology to brain-damaged human beings, it has the potential to change what it means to be human.

In order to tease out what it means to be natural, philosophers separate “nature” from “culture.” Human beings have developed a high-tech culture that changes their relationship to nature, a culture that fauna, flora, and ecosystems do not possess. But they caution that regardless of how advanced our technology or culture becomes, we still have to rely on natural systems to survive.

Read this excerpt from the University of Aberdeen’s Philosophy Department:

No matter what kind of exodus humans make from nature, they are going to remain male or female, with hearts and livers, and blood in their veins, walking on two feet, and eating energies that were originally captured in photosynthesis by chlorophyll. Culture remains tethered to the biosystem and the options within built environments, however expanded, provide no release from nature, which remains as a life-support system. Humans depend on air flow, water cycles, sunshine, nitrogen-fixation, decomposition bacteria, fungi, the ozone layer, food chains, insect pollination, soils, earthworms, climates, oceans, and genetic materials. An ecology always lies in the background of culture, natural givens that underlie everything else. Some sort of inclusive environmental fitness is required of even the most advanced, high-tech culture.

So, if we develop technologies like synthetic brain parts that allow animals (and eventually humans) to have two-way communication with computer parts, which challenges the notion – by the way – that we will always have hearts and livers, we ensure even longer survival rates of privileged members of our species. But we still have to survive on the earth’s finite resources.

Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown is famous for pointing out that if the whole planet eats like people in India, who consume on average 200 kilograms of grain per year (1/4 what the average American consumes), the planet can support 10 billion people a population we are expected to reach at least as soon as the end of this century. On the other hand, if everyone strives to achieve the American lifestyle – the goal of many in the developing world – the planet can only support 2.5 billion people.

Surely a moratorium on certain scientific developments – like overextending the life of a brain that has reached the end of its “natural” life – should be combined with family planning measures in order to ensure the long-term survival of our species?

:: New Scientist

More on population control in the Middle East:

The Latest Most Urgent Reason to Breed and Consume Less

How do Treehumpers Prevent Pregnancy?

MENA and Muslim Women: Can Having Less Babies Really Save the World?

Image: Life Science Databases (Wikimedia Commons)

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