Speaking of cousin marriages, here's an interesting article I just found. Did you know that fully half of all Arab marriages are between first or second cousins?
"Cousin Marriage Conundrum: The ancient practice discourages democratic
nation-building"
by Steve Sailer
The American Conservative,
Jan. 13, 2003, pp. 20-22 (not online)
Many prominent neoconservatives are calling on America not only to conquer
Iraq (and perhaps more Muslim nations after that), but also to rebuild Iraqi
society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the Middle East. Yet,
Americans know so little about the Middle East that few of us are even aware
of one of one of the building blocks of Arab Muslim cultures -- cousin
marriage. Not surprisingly, we are almost utterly innocent of any
understanding of how much the high degree of inbreeding in Iraq could
interfere with our nation building ambitions.
In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are
first or second cousins to each other. A 1986 study of 4,500 married hospital
patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46% were wed to a first or second
cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53% were "consanguineously"
married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is that
of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.
By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding
makes the development of civil society more difficult. Many Americans have
heard by now that Iraq is composed of three ethnic groups -- the Kurds of the
north, the Sunnis of the center, and the Shi'ites of the south. Clearly,
these ethnic rivalries would complicate the task of ruling reforming Iraq.
But that's just a top-down summary of Iraq's ethnic make-up. Each of those
three ethnic groups is divisible into smaller and smaller tribes, clans, and
inbred extended families -- each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds.
And the engine at the bottom of these bedeviling social divisions is the
oft-ignored institution of cousin marriage.
The fractiousness and tribalism of Middle Eastern countries have frequently
been remarked. In 1931, King Feisal of Iraq described his subjects as "devoid
of any patriotic idea, … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil;
prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government
whatever." The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in
countries such as Iraq appears to be in tied to the high rates of inbreeding.
Muslim countries are usually known for warm, devoted extended family
relationships, but also for weak patriotism. In the U.S., where individualism
is so strong, many assume that "family values" and civic virtues such as
sacrificing for the good of society always go together. But, in Islamic
countries, loyalty to extended (as opposed to nuclear) families is often at
war with loyalty to nation. Civic virtues, military effectiveness, and
economic performance all suffer.
Commentator Randall Parker wrote, "Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the
biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern
politics. Most Western political theorists seem blind to the importance of
pre-ideological kinship-based political bonds in large part because those
bonds are not derived from abstract Western ideological models of how
societies and political systems should be organized. … Extended families that
are incredibly tightly bound are really the enemy of civil society because
the alliances of family override any consideration of fairness to people in
the larger society. Yet, this obvious fact is missing from 99% of the
discussions about what is wrong with the Middle East. How can we transform
Iraq into a modern liberal democracy if every government worker sees a
government job as a route to helping out his clan at the expense of other
clans?"
Retired U.S. Army colonel Norvell De Atkine spent years trying to train
America's Arab allies in modern combat techniques. In an article in American
Diplomacy entitled, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," a frustrated De Atkine explained,
"First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own
family adversely affects offensive operations… In a culture in which almost
every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships,
is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the
military, particularly in the stress of battle. "Offensive action, basically,
consists of fire and maneuver," De Atkine continued. "The maneuver element
must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire.
If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward
against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and
leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership."
Similarly, as Francis Fukuyama described in his 1995 book "Trust: The Social
Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity," countries such as Italy with highly
loyal extended families can generate dynamic family firms. Yet, their larger
corporations tend to be rife with goldbricking, corruption, and nepotism, all
because their employees don't trust each other to show their highest loyalty
to the firm rather than their own extended families. Arab cultures are more
family-focused than even Sicily, and thus their larger economic enterprises
suffer even more.
American society is so biased against inbreeding that many Americans have a
hard time even conceiving of marrying a cousin. Yet, arranged matches between
first cousins (especially between the children of brothers) are considered
the ideal throughout much of a broad expanse from North Africa through West
Asia and into Pakistan and India.
In contrast, Americans probably disapprove of what scientists call
"consanguineous" mating more than any other nationality. Three huge studies
in the U.S. between 1941 and 1981 found that no more than 0.2% of all
American marriages were between first cousins or second cousins.
Americans have long dismissed cousin marriage as something practiced only
among hillbillies. That old stereotype of inbred mountaineers waging decades
long blood feuds had some truth to it. One study of 107 marriages in Beech
Creek, Kentucky in 1942 found 19% were consanguineous, although the
Kentuckians were more inclined toward second cousin marriages, while first
cousin couples are more common than second cousins pairings in the Islamic
lands.
Cousin marriage averages not much more than one percent in most European
countries, and under 10% in the rest of the world outside that Morocco to
Southern India corridor.
Muslim immigration, however, has been boosting Europe's low level of
consanguinity. According to the leading authority on inbreeding, geneticist
Alan H. Bittles of Edith Cowan U. in Perth, Australia, "In the resident
Pakistani community of some 0.5 million [in Britain] an estimated 50% to 60+%
of marriages are consanguineous, with evidence that their prevalence is
increasing." (Bittles' Web-site www.Consang.net presents the results of
several hundred studies of the prevalence of inbreeding around the world.)
European nations have recently become increasingly hostile toward the common
practice among their Muslim immigrants of arranging marriages between their
children and citizens of their home country, frequently their relatives. One
study of Turkish guest-workers in the Danish city of Ishøj found that 98% --
1st, 2nd and 3rd generation -- married a spouse from Turkey who then came and
lived in Denmark. (Turks, however, are quite a bit less enthusiastic about
cousin marriage than are Arabs or Pakistanis, which correlates with the much
stronger degree of patriotism found in Turkey.)
European "family reunification" laws present an immigrant with the
opportunity to bring in his nephew by marrying his daughter to him. Not
surprisingly, "family reunification" almost always works just in one
direction -- with the new husband moving from the poor Muslim country to the
rich European country.
If a European-born daughter refused to marry her cousin from the old country
just because she doesn't love him, that would deprive her extended family of
the boon of an immigration visa. So, intense family pressure can fall on the
daughter to do as she is told.
The new Danish right wing government has introduced legislation to crack down
on these kind of marriages arranged to generate visas. British Home Secretary
David Blunkett has called for immigrants to arrange more marriages within
Britain.
Unlike the Middle East, Europe underwent what Samuel P. Huntington calls the
"Romeo and Juliet revolution." Europeans became increasingly sympathetic
toward the right of a young woman to marry the man she loves. Setting the
stage for this was the Catholic Church's long war against cousin marriage,
even out to fourth cousins or higher. This weakened the extended family in
Europe, thus lessening the advantages of arranged marriages. It also
strengthened broader institutions like the Church and the nation-state.
Islam itself may not be responsible for the high rates of inbreeding in
Muslim countries. (Similarly high levels of consanguinity are found among
Hindus in Southern India, although there, uncle-niece marriages are socially
preferred, even though their degree of genetic similarity is twice that of
cousin marriages, with worse health consequences for offspring.)
Rafat Hussain, a Pakistani-born Senior Lecturer at the U. of New England in
Australia, told me, "Islam does not specifically encourage cousin marriages
and, in fact, in the early days of the spread of Islam, marriages outside the
clan were highly desirable to increase cultural and religious influence." She
adds, "The practice has little do with Islam (or in fact any religion) and
has been a prevalent cultural norm before Islam." Inbreeding (or "endogamy")
is also common among Christians in the Middle East, although less so than
among Muslims.
The Muslim practice is similar to older Middle Eastern norms, such as those
outlined in Leviticus in the Old Testament. The lineage of the Hebrew
Patriarchs who founded the Jewish people was highly inbred. Abraham said his
wife Sarah was also his half-sister. His son Isaac married Rebekah, a cousin
once removed. And Isaac's son Jacob wed his two first cousins, Leah and
Rachel.
Jacob's dozen sons were the famous progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of
Israel. Due to inbreeding, Jacob's eight legitimate sons had only six unique
great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. That's because the inbred are
related to their relatives through multiple paths.
Why do so many people around the world prefer to keep marriage in the family?
Hussain noted, "In patriarchal societies where parents exert considerable
influence and gender segregation is followed more strictly, marriage choice
is limited to whom you know. While there is some pride in staying within the
inner bounds of family for social or economic reasons, the more important
issue is: Where will parents find a good match? Often, it boils down to whom
you know and can trust."
Another important motivation -- one that is particularly important in many
herding cultures, such as the ancients ones from which the Jews and Muslims
emerged -- is to prevent inheritable wealth from being split among too many
descendents. This can be especially important when there are economies of
scale in the family business.
Just as the inbred have fewer unique ancestors than the outbred, they also
have fewer unique heirs, helping keep both the inheritance and the brothers
together. When a herd-owning patriarch marries his son off to his younger
brother's daughter, he insures that his grandson and his grandnephew will be
the same person. Likewise, the younger brother benefits from knowing that his
grandson will also be the patriarch's grandson and heir. Thus, by making
sibling rivalry over inheritance less relevant, cousin marriage emotionally
unites families.
The anthropologist Carleton Coon also pointed out that by minimizing the
number of relatives a Bedouin Arab nomad has, this system of inbreeding "does
not overextend the number of persons whose deaths an honorable man must
avenge."
Of course, there are also disadvantages to inbreeding. The best known is
medical. Being inbred increases the chance of inheriting genetic syndromes
caused by malign recessive genes. Bittles found that, after controlling for
socio-economic factors, the babies of first cousins had about a 30% higher
chance of dying before their first birthdays.
The biggest disadvantage, however, may be political.
Are Muslims, especially Arabs, so much more loyal to their families than to
their nations because, due to countless generations of cousin marriages, they
are so much more genealogically related to their families than Westerners are
related to theirs? Frank Salter, a political scientist at the Max Planck
Institute in Germany whose new book "Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and
Ethnicity" takes a sociobiological look at the reason why Mafia families are
indeed families, told me, "That's my hunch; at least it's bound to be a
factor."
One of the basic laws of modern evolutionary science, quantified by the great
Oxford biologist William D. Hamilton in 1964 under the name "kin selection,"
is that the more close the genetic relationship between two people, the more
likely they are to feel loyalty and altruism toward each other. Natural
selection has molded us not just to try to propagate our own genes, but to
help our relatives, who possess copies of some of our specific genes, to
propagate their own.
Nepotism is thus biologically inspired. Hamilton explained that the level of
nepotistic feeling generally depends upon degree of genetic similarity. You
share half your personally variable genes with your children and siblings,
but one quarter with your nephews/nieces and grandchildren, so your
nepotistic urges will tend to be somewhat less toward them. You share one
eighth of your genes with your first cousins, and one thirty-second with your
second cousin, so your feelings of family loyalty tend to fall off quickly.
But not as quickly if you and your relatives are inbred. Then, you'll be
genealogically and related to your kin via multiple pathways. You will all be
genetically more similar, so your normal family feelings will be multiplied.
For example, your son-in-law might be also be the nephew you've cherished
since his childhood, so you can lavish all the nepotistic altruism on him
that in an outbred family would be split between your son-in-law and your
nephew.
Unfortunately, nepotism is usually a zero sum game, so the flip side of being
materially nicer toward your relatives would be that you'd have less
resources left with which to be civil, or even just fair, toward non-kin. So,
nepotistic corruption is rampant in countries such as Iraq, where Saddam has
appointed members of his extended family from his hometown of Tikrit to many
key positions in the national government.
Similarly, a tendency toward inbreeding can turn an extended family into a
miniature racial group with its own partially isolated gene pool. (Dog
breeders use extreme forms of inbreeding to quickly create new breeds in a
handful of generations.) The ancient Hebrews provide a vivid example of a
partly inbred extended family (that of Abraham and his brothers) that evolved
into its own ethnic group. This process has been going on for thousands of
years in the Middle East, which is why not just the Jews, but also why tiny,
ancient inbreeding groups such as the Samaritans, the John the
Baptist-worshipping Sabeans, and the Lucifer-worshipping Yezidis still
survive.
In summary, although neoconservatives constantly point to America's success
at reforming Germany and Japan after World War II has evidence that it would
be easy to do the same in the Middle East, the deep social structure of Iraq
is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states, with their highly
patriotic, cooperative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples. The Iraqis,
in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys.
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