LOS ANGELES, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- In Iraq, as in many other Middle Eastern countries, nearly half of all married couples are also first or second cousins to each other.
Although America is debating invading and occupying Iraq, and Muslim immigrants in the U.S. now number around two million and are growing rapidly, Americans are just barely beginning to notice the importance of one of the building blocks of most Islamic cultures: cousin marriage.
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 Iraq about half of all married couples are also first or second cousins to each other. In Pakistan, the ratio may be even higher.
This has implications for immigration, assimilation, and foreign policy that Westerners have barely begun to consider. If America tries to reform Iraq's political culture as it did Japan's after 1945, then understanding the social impact of cousin marriage will become highly necessary.
The proportion of cousin marriages actually increased in many of these Muslim countries during the second half of the 20th Century. Why? Because better health care meant more of a young person's cousins survived to marriageable age, making this long-fashionable goal more often feasible.
Today, family sizes are declining in some Muslim countries, especially Iran, which should make arranging cousin unions more difficult in the future. (On the Arabian Peninsula, however, birth rates remain extremely high.) Still, these forecasted declines in the rate of cousin marriage will take decades to become significant, though.
In contrast, Americans probably disapprove of what scientists call "consanguineous" mating more than any other nationality. Americans have long dismissed inbreeding as something practiced only among hillbillies.
That old stereotype probably 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 weighted toward second cousin marriages, while first cousin couples are more common than second cousins pairings in the Islamic lands.
Today, over half the states in American states ban first cousin marriages, at least among those able to have children. This reflects popular distaste. 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.
On the other hand, first cousin marriage is legal in Britain. Indeed, such British icons as Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin married their first cousins (with apparently deleterious health consequences for their descendents). Yet, as in most of the rest of modern Europe, less than 1% of British marriages are consanguineous.
Muslim immigration to Britain is changing that. 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 an estimated 50% to 60+% of marriages are consanguineous, with evidence that their prevalence is increasing." (Bittles' Web-site Consang.net presents the results of several hundred studies of the prevalence of inbreeding around the world.)
European nations have 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 interested in cousin marriage than are Arabs or Pakistanis.)
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.
Unlike Middle Eastern societies, European culture, at least Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," has been increasingly sympathetic toward the right of a young woman to marry the man she loves. 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.
How common is cousin marriage among Muslim immigrants to the U.S.? Consanguinity researcher Rafat Hussain, a Pakistani-born Senior Lecturer at the U. of New England in Australia, told UPI, "For both first generation immigrants (naturalized) and second generation immigrants (those born in the U.S.), there would be a significant number of cousin marriages. With first cousin marriages illegal in so many states and socially disapproved in all the rest, though, little hard data is available.
Muslim immigrants to America have tended to come from the upper classes, among whom cousin marriage is less common, while Muslim immigrants to Europe have tended to be peasants imported to perform cheap labor. In general, cousin marriage in Muslim countries is less common among the elite. U.S. Muslim immigrants have been much more likely to have college degrees than American-born citizens, and thus are less isolated from Western norms than European Muslims.
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.)
Hussain contends, "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."
The Muslim practice is similar to older Middle Eastern norms, such as that 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.
Due to inbreeding, Jacobs' eight legitimate sons (who were among the progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel) had only six unique great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. That's because the inbred tend to be related to their relatives through multiple paths.
Indeed, Muslim law is more restrictive than traditional Jewish law because the Koran forbids uncle-niece unions. Strikingly, the state of Rhode Island, with its ancient tradition of religious tolerance, allows Jewish men to marry their nieces, so long as the union is "solemnized among the Jews."
Inbreeding (or "endogamy") is also common among Christians in the Middle East, although less than among Muslims. Unfortunately, no data seems to exist for Muslims native to Europe, such as the Albanians. Bittles' Web-site does report that cousin marriages are not as common in Muslim countries in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia.
Are cousin marriages ever love matches? Hussain notes, "In some regions, where your only chance of knowing the opposite sex in any reasonable detail is your extended family, love affairs tend to precede cousin marriages, or there is an implicit or explicit interest in marrying a cousin."
Why do so many people around the world prefer to keep marriage in the family? Hussain argues, "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 a family's reputation depends upon the size of its herd.
Just as the inbred have fewer unique ancestors than the outbred, they also have fewer unique heirs, helping keep the herd together. When a herd-owning patriarch marries his son 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. 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.
A much less studied and thus more speculative question is one that could possibly prove an obstacle to American attempts at "nation building" and introducing democracy in the Muslim world.
The fractiousness and tribalism of Middle Eastern countries has often been remarked upon. In 1931, King Faisal 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." Perhaps the clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in countries such as Iraq could be -- to some degree -- a direct outcome of the high rates of inbreeding.
Muslim countries are usually known for warm, devoted, 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, family loyalty and national loyalty are often at war.
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."
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 biological look at the reason why Mafia families are indeed families, told UPI, "That's my hunch; at least it's bound to be a factor."
One of the basic laws of evolutionary science, quantified by 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 compared to what they feel toward non-family members.
Theoretically at least, a tendency toward inbreeding can turn an extended family into a miniature racial group with its own partially isolated gene pool. (Dog breeders, of course, use even more extreme forms of inbreeding to quickly create new breeds.)
In fact, the ancient Hebrews provide a vivid example of a partly inbred extended family (that of Abraham and his brothers) turning into its own ethnic group.
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 and reforming Iraqi public life. 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 partly inbred extended families -- each with their own alliances, rivalries, and feuds.
And the engine at the bottom of these bedeviling social divisions is the oft-ignored institution of cousin marriage.
