# Why cousin marriage matters in Iraq



## Kunu (26 Dec 2006)

Not sure which forum exactly this best fits into, but I thought it was an interesting article nonetheless that may have some insights into why things are the way they are. 

Fair dealings, etc., etc.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1226/p09s01-coop.html



> Why cousin marriage matters in Iraq
> Clan loyalty fixed by cousin marriage was always bound to undermine democracy in Iraq.
> By Anne Bobroff-Hajal
> WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. – Compared with the rest of the world, the United States is a young country. Its people left many of their traditional social structures behind, crossed vast oceans, and started anew. So to understand the lives of the majority of people around the world, who live within institutions that have shaped human existence for centuries, Americans need to make a special effort to see things from a very different perspective.
> ...



Besides the overall point of the article, one other thing that caught my attention was the following:



> (The risk that cousins' offspring will suffer genetic anomalies is somewhat mitigated by genetic benefits too complex to discuss here.)



Does anybody have any idea as to what these "genetic benefits" are?  I mean, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as my expertise here goes as far as a high school bio class back in the day, but I am curious about the details.


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## niner domestic (26 Dec 2006)

I believe they are referring to the current mechanisms of genetic testing available to couples.  You can read more on this at: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503544772 and at: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?cid=1123996015666&pagename=IslamOnline-English-AAbout_Islam/AskAboutIslamE/AskAboutIslamE


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## Old Sweat (26 Dec 2006)

It means family reunions are a great place to pick up girls.


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## Bruce Monkhouse (26 Dec 2006)

Have'nt they always been???


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## gnome123 (26 Dec 2006)

Wouldn't this lead to defects to the baby? Or is that just a myth?


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## Kunu (26 Dec 2006)

niner domestic said:
			
		

> I believe they are referring to the current mechanisms of genetic testing available to couples.  You can read more on this at: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503544772 and at: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?cid=1123996015666&pagename=IslamOnline-English-AAbout_Islam/AskAboutIslamE/AskAboutIslamE



Umm...those go over methods of testing to predict the likelyhood of undesired genetic traits, but I got the impression that the article suggested that positive genetic things could come out of cousin marriage.  



			
				Old Sweat said:
			
		

> It means family reunions are a great place to pick up girls.



LOL  ;D   ​


			
				gnome123 said:
			
		

> Wouldn't this lead to defects to the baby? Or is that just a myth?



It's not a myth.  While it is not guaranteed to cause defects, and by some of the linked websites, apparently in most cases defects do not occur, the probability of them happening does increase.  The classic example is hemophilia within the Royal Family.


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## FoverF (28 Dec 2006)

Marriage between cousins cannot 'cause' genetic disorders, per se.

Most genetic disorders are recessive, so both parents have to have the gene for there to be a possibility of the children having the defect. And it is much more likely that both parents carry the gene for a recessive disorder if they are closely related. 

In *some cases* in-breeding can result in a decrease in recessive genetic disorders, because a clan (over the long term) is less likely to be succesful if 25+% of it's children have hemophilia (to follow an example), which would be the case if everyone in the clan carried the gene for hemophilia. If the whole family has a recessive gene for hemophilia, 25% of the kids from such marriages will have the disorder (or 50% of kids if one parent already has hemophilia, and 100% if both parents have the disorder). 

The clans with such major genetic disorders will die out within a few generations, limiting the incidences of hemophilia within the general population. 

This is the only 'benefit' to in-breeding (ie your clan dies out if it has major genetic disorders), and it only helps your family if you've already got very healthy genes. 

If you had no major recessive genetic disorders you could mate with first cousins, siblings, or even parents, with no risk of genetic defects in the children. 

Although I don't have any hard data on this, and am quite willing to be corrected by anyone who's done a study, I HIGHLY doubt that in-breeding in Iraqi clans is rigorous enough to provide any real genetic benefit.


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## Kirkhill (28 Dec 2006)

Given an awareness of successfully breeding horses, camels, goats, chickens etc, I don't think the clans would be unaware of the disadvantages of in-breeding.  Likewise I think they have tools at their disposal to mitigate the problems.  Because of the strict hierarchy and general tendency to conform, if the clan patriarch said that a boy or girl shall not marry then I think it is likely that they wouldn't marry.  At the other, extreme, end of the range of options, infanticide is not unknown in tribal societies although I don't know what the incidence of that is in the Middle East.

Kilo Mike- great catch on putting a different slant on the issues.

Cheers.

Edit: This quote from the consang.net site that you linked to seems to bring the "problem" a bit closer to home when considering multi-culturalism and integration.


> Migrant communities now permanently resident in Western countries may represent a special case, especially where they practice a religion not followed by the majority indigenous population. In such communities, the available evidence from Western Europe, North America and Australasia suggests that the prevalence of consanguineous unions is increasing, in many cases from an already high level (for example, de Costa 1988; Modell 1991; Hoodfar and Teebi 1996; Reniers 1998). Various reasons can be advanced for this finding, including the desire to find a marital partner from within the community, which itself may be numerically small and composed of a restricted number of kindreds, and the wish to maintain community traditions in a new and unfamiliar environment. However, explanations of this type underestimate the strong belief that marriage within the family, as opposed solely to community endogamy, is the most desirable and reliable marital option (Bittles et al. 1991; Hussain and Bittles 1998; Hussain 1999). As previously noted, the current increase in the numbers of persons of marriageable age within these communities effectively facilitates the fulfillment of this belief.



http://www.consang.net/summary.html

One other aspect of tribal society and forming internal links is the concept of "fostering".  Again I don't know about the actual situation in Iraq but it is not uncommon for a woman's son to be sent to be raised by her brother, his uncle, as a "foster son".  Together with uncles marrying nieces and cousins marrying each other this further strengthens the internal ties of the clan.  (Anthropology 20 University of Western Ontario)
.


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## 1feral1 (28 Dec 2006)

FoverF said:
			
		

> Marriage between cousins cannot 'cause' genetic disorders, per se.
> 
> Most genetic disorders are recessive, so both parents have to have the gene for there to be a possibility of the children having the defect. And it is much more likely that both parents carry the gene for a recessive disorder if they are closely related.
> 
> ...



Bloody hell, Deliverance in a middle eastern theme. Dueling sitars with IEDs for base!

Question: Who are you? Some type of geniticist?

How about backing up your statement with a reference or link.


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## Colin Parkinson (28 Dec 2006)

Reading about early Islam, Mohammad seem to recognize the inherent weakness in the Arabic tribal/clan traditions coupled with multi-animalism as a religion. He foresaw that they would be overtaken by the Jews and Christians that had formed a strong union through their religion that was able to transcend beyond the clan/tribe ties. This is why he created Islam, using components from the existing religious practices (Almost all of the religious ceremonies in Mecca predate Islam considerable) and Judaism/ Christianity.


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## FoverF (28 Dec 2006)

> Question: Who are you? Some type of geniticist?



I'm doing a Physics degree, with a dual-major in Applied Math.
I also study biology and organic chemistry, because in the event that I don't get a pilot slot in the CF, I plan to go into medicine.



> How about backing up your statement with a reference or link.



gladly
(most of my info comes from hard-copy, so I apologise for the wiki links):

http://jmg.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/36/11/862          (a specific medical example of a Jordanian clan overtaken by hereditary blindness due to inbreeding)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_genetics        (probabilities of recessive disorders based on parents' genome)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding                    (self-explanitory)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect              (building a community from a limited gene pool, ie a clan patriarch)




> Given an awareness of successfully breeding horses, camels, goats, chickens etc, I don't think the clans would be unaware of the disadvantages of in-breeding.



I agree completely. But I also think that the author talking about the 'genetic benefits of inbreeding' was just trying to avoid seeming overly critical of the practice. 

Random in-breeding within a family does not produce any genetic benefits. 
If we're talking about the selective and controlled breeding methods familiar to farmers everywhere, when done with humans, this is called EUGENICS. This can produce genetic benefits, but is quite distinct from simply inbreeding.

And I'm certainly not accusing Iraqi clans of this practice (I know pretty much dick all about Iraqi marriage customs anyways), and don't want to touch that topic with a 20ft pole on this forum anyways.



> Thus, to many Iraqis, nepotism in government and business isn't a bad thing - it's a moral imperative. The flip side of favoring relatives is that, as Steven Sailer observed in The American Conservative in 2003, it leaves fewer resources "with which to be fair toward non-kin. So nepotistic corruption is rampant in countries such as Iraq."



Here's the article by Mr Sailer that she's referencing:

http://www.isteve.com/cousin_marriage_conundrum.htm

It covers inbreeding in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, and claims that clan loyalty completely undermines any loyalty to "Iraq" as a nation. I have no idea how accurate it is (particularily it's statistics), but it's an interesting read.


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## Kirkhill (28 Dec 2006)

FoverF said:
			
		

> And I'm certainly not accusing Iraqi clans of this practice (I know pretty much dick all about Iraqi marriage customs anyways), and don't want to touch that topic with a 20ft pole on this forum anyways.



Agreed entirely.


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## Kunu (28 Dec 2006)

FoverF said:
			
		

> In *some cases* in-breeding can result in a decrease in recessive genetic disorders, because a clan (over the long term) is less likely to be succesful if 25+% of it's children have hemophilia (to follow an example), which would be the case if everyone in the clan carried the gene for hemophilia. If the whole family has a recessive gene for hemophilia, 25% of the kids from such marriages will have the disorder (or 50% of kids if one parent already has hemophilia, and 100% if both parents have the disorder).
> 
> The clans with such major genetic disorders will die out within a few generations, limiting the incidences of hemophilia within the general population.
> 
> This is the only 'benefit' to in-breeding (ie your clan dies out if it has major genetic disorders), and it only helps your family if you've already got very healthy genes.



So then you're saying the benefit is really only to the society/population as a whole by possibly "quarantining" undesired recessive genes, as opposed to the family doing the inbreeding.  This is speaking of genetic benefits only of course; I can see how keeping wealth concentrated and tightening family ties for survival, etc. could be a greater factor that encourages this practice to continue.


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## Kirkhill (28 Dec 2006)

Colin P said:
			
		

> Reading about early Islam, Mohammad seem to recognize the inherent weakness in the Arabic tribal/clan traditions coupled with multi-animalism as a religion. He foresaw that they would be overtaken by the Jews and Christians that had formed a strong union through their religion that was able to transcend beyond the clan/tribe ties. This is why he created Islam, using components from the existing religious practices (Almost all of the religious ceremonies in Mecca predate Islam considerable) and Judaism/ Christianity.



Colin, it would appear that Mohammed was not as successful as he might have hoped.


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## Emenince Grise (28 Dec 2006)

It should be pointed out that marriage to a cousin is completely legal in Canada. You can not marry your mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, son, daughter, sister or brother by birth or adoption... but you _can_ legally marry your cousin. Whether that is wise is something I will not comment upon.


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## Gunner98 (28 Dec 2006)

Another take on this issue.  Reproduced in its entirety under the Fair Dealing Provisions of the Copyright Act.   Bold emphasis is mine and highlights what I think are the issues relevant to this discussion.  http://www.fsa.ulaval.ca/personnel/vernag/eh/f/cause/lectures/Iraqi%20Family%20Ties.htm

New York Times
John Tierney 
Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change

New York Times, Sept. 27, 2003

Iqbal Muhammad does not recall her first glimpse of her future husband, because they were both newborns at the time, but she remembers precisely when she knew he was the one. It was the afternoon her uncle walked over from his house next door and proposed that she marry his son Muhammad.

"I was a little surprised, but I knew right away it was a wise choice," she said, recalling that afternoon nine years ago, when she and Muhammad were 22. "It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger."

Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America. The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here, from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women's status to creating a liberal democracy.

"Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages," said Robin Fox of Rutgers University, the author of "Kinship and Marriage," a widely used anthropology textbook. "Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers."

Iraqis frequently describe nepotism not as a civic problem but as a moral duty. The notion that Iraq's next leader would put public service ahead of family obligations drew a smile from Iqbal's uncle and father-in-law, Sheik Yousif Sayel, the patriarch in charge of the clan's farm on the Tigris River south of Baghdad.

"In this country, whoever is in power will bring his relatives in from the village and give them important positions," Sheik Yousif said, sitting in the garden surrounded by some of his 21 children and 83 grandchildren. "That is what Saddam did, and now those relatives are fulfilling their obligation to protect him from the Americans."
*
Saddam Hussein married a first cousin who grew up in the same house as he did, and he ordered most of his children to marry their cousins. Sheik Yousif said he never forced any of his children to marry anyone, but more than half of the ones to marry have wed cousins. The patriarch was often the one who first suggested the match, as he did with his son Muhammad nine years ago.*

"My father said that I was old enough to get married, and I agreed," Muhammad recalled. "He and my mother recommended Iqbal. I respected their wishes. It was my desire, too. We knew each other. It was much simpler to marry within the family."

A month later, after the wedding, Iqbal moved next door to the home of Sheik Yousif. Moving in with the in-laws might be an American bride's nightmare, but Iqbal said her toughest adjustment occurred five years later, when Sheik Yousif decided that she and Muhammad were ready to live by themselves in a new home he provided just behind his own.

"I felt a little lonely at first when we moved into the house by ourselves," Iqbal said. Muhammad said he, too, felt lonely in the new house, and he expressed pity for American parents and children living thousands of miles from each other.

Sheik Yousif, who is 82, said he could not imagine how the elderly in America coped in their homes alone. "I could not bear to go a week without seeing my children," he said. Some of his daughters have married outsiders and moved into other patriarchal clans, but the rest of the children are never far away.

Muhammad and three other sons live on the farm with him, helping to supervise the harvesting of barley, wheat and oranges, and the dates from the palm trees on their land. The other six sons have moved 15 miles away to Baghdad, but they come back often for meals and in hard times. During the war in the spring, almost the whole clan took refuge at the farm.

Next to the family, the sons' social priority is the tribe, Sadah, which has several thousand members in the area and is led by Sheik Yousif. He and his children see their neighbors when praying at Sunni mosques, but none belong to the kind of civic professional groups that are so common in America, the pillars of civil society that observers since de Tocqueville have been crediting for the promotion of democracy.

"I told my children not to participate in any outside groups or clubs," Sheik Yousif said. "We don't want distractions. We have a dynasty to preserve." To make his point, he told his sons to unroll the family tree, a scroll 70 feet long with lots of cousins intertwined in the branches.

*Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions — like the church.*

The practice became rare in the West, especially after evidence emerged of genetic risks to offspring, but it has persisted in some places, notably the Middle East, which is exceptional because of both the high prevalence and the restrictive form it takes. In other societies, a woman typically weds a cousin outside her social group, like a maternal cousin living in a clan led by a different patriarch. *But in Iraq the ideal is for the woman to remain within the clan by marrying the son of her father's brother, as Iqbal did.*

The families resulting from these marriages have made nation-building a frustrating process in the Middle East, as King Faisal and T. E. Lawrence both complained after efforts to unite Arab tribes.

"The tribes were convinced that they had made a free and Arab Government, and that each of them was It," Lawrence wrote in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" in 1926. "They were independent and would enjoy themselves a conviction and resolution which might have led to anarchy, if they had not made more stringent the family tie, and the bonds of kin-responsibility. But this entailed a negation of central power."

That dichotomy remains today, said Ihsan M. al-Hassan, a sociologist at the University of Baghdad. *At the local level, the clan traditions provide more support and stability than Western institutions, he said, noting that the divorce rate among married cousins is only 2 percent in Iraq, versus 30 percent for other Iraqi couples. But the local ties create national complications.*

*"The traditional Iraqis who marry their cousins are very suspicious of outsiders," Dr. Hassan said. "In a modern state a citizen's allegiance is to the state, but theirs is to their clan and their tribe. If one person in your clan does something wrong, you favor him anyway, and you expect others to treat their relatives the same way."*

The more educated and urbanized Iraqis have become, Dr. Hassan said, the more they are likely to marry outsiders and adopt Western values. But the clan traditions have hardly disappeared in the cities, as is evident by the just-married cousins who parade Thursday evenings into the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad. Surveys in Baghdad and other Arab cities in the past two decades have found that close to half of marriages are between first or second cousins.

The prevalence of cousin marriage did not get much attention before the war from Republicans in the United States who expected a quick, orderly transition to democracy in Iraq. But one writer who investigated the practice warned fellow conservatives to stop expecting postwar Iraq to resemble postwar Germany or Japan.

"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," Steve Sailer wrote in The American Conservative magazine in January. "The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The skeptics have local history on their side, because Middle Eastern countries have tended toward either internecine conflict or authoritarian government dominated by kin, cronies and religious leaders. Elsewhere, though, democracy has coexisted with strong kinship systems.

"Japan and India have managed to blend traditional social structures with modern democracy, and Iraq could do the same," said Stanley Kurtz, an anthropologist at the Hoover Institution. But it will take time and finesse, he said, along with respect for traditions like women wearing the veil.
*
"A key purpose of veiling is to prevent outsiders from competing with a woman's cousins for marriage," Dr. Kurtz said. "Attack veiling, and you are attacking the core of the Middle Eastern social system."*

Sheik Yousif and his sons said they put no faith in American promises of democracy — or any other promises, for that matter.

"Do you know why Saddam Hussein has not been captured?" asked Saleh, the oldest son of Sheik Yousif. "Because his own family will never turn him in, and no one else trusts the Americans to pay the reward." Saleh dismissed the reports that Americans had given $30 million and safe passage out of Iraq to the informant who turned in Mr. Hussein's sons.

"I assure you that never happened," Saleh said. "The American soldiers brought out a camera and gave him the money in front of a witness, and then they took him toward the Turkish border. Near the border they killed him and buried him in a valley. They wanted the money for their own families."


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## Dogboy (29 Dec 2006)

well that cover it right ther 
"Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions — like the church."
how do you set up a gov. in a situation like that?


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## FoverF (29 Dec 2006)

Well, eliminating marriage between cousins may very well "reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions", in this case a hopefully slightly secular democracy. But we are talking here about something that would occur over many generations. 

Clan marriage is not something that can really be addresed within the time scale of Iraq's current crisis. Any viable solution in Iraq is going to have to show results within the timescale of the US electoral cycles. 

The fact that there's a lot of consanginuity is important, and it should be noted, but it doesn't really seem to suggest a way forward at the moment. I think it's something the coalition and the Iraqi government will just have to deal with for now.


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## Kirkhill (29 Dec 2006)

FoverF said:
			
		

> Well, eliminating marriage between cousins may very well "reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions", in this case a hopefully slightly secular democracy. But we are talking here about something that would occur over many generations.
> 
> Clan marriage is not something that can really be addresed within the time scale of Iraq's current crisis. Any viable solution in Iraq is going to have to show results within the timescale of the US electoral cycles.
> 
> The fact that there's a lot of consanginuity is important, and it should be noted, but it doesn't really seem to suggest a way forward at the moment. I think it's something the coalition and the Iraqi government will just have to deal with for now.



I agree that the Iraq situation can't be addressed by dealing with such issues as consanguinity, and that that has a greater bearing on whether or not a society will choose to order itself as a democracy.  The bigger problem is that notion of bringing democracy to the world that is at the heart of America.

St. Augustine started his mission in the 4th century (interestingly Mohammed appears to have adopted the same strategy in the 7th century).  1400 years later America emerged as a paragon of democracy but the antithesis of everything St. Augustine intended.  And strangely enough, the most strongly democratizing tendency came from those self-same in-bred, individualistic, paternalistic Hatfields and McCoys - unwilling to accept any central authority.  They still exist in the US today 200 years later.

As noted converting societies is not compatible with a 2 year election cycle - nor with societies where people have figured out that democracy gives them the right to vote for free bread-and-circuses.

In my opinion the idealists in the US, coupled with those that have a hate on for Empire generally and had a hate on for the British Empire in particular, could not bring themselves to believe that they were wrong about the underlying nature of people.  They honestly believed that if you poked anybody awake at 3 O'Clock in the morning that they would wake up cursing in pure Brooklynese and that everybody wanted, or accepted, "Life-Liberty-The Pursuit of Happiness" and inalienable rights as the route to a peaceful, ordered society.  The American Revolutionaries argued they would rather be free to take their chances and end up dead rather than be safe and secure.  Evidence would suggest that even in America that is a minority position.  Most people are willing to give up liberty in order to be safe.  All they ask is that they not be exploited.
"Peace-Order-Good Governance" seems to resonate better.

From that it is a short step to looking at the Middle East and pointing out that  effective modernization HAS occured under the Kings of Jordan, the Sultans of Oman and the Gulf State Sheikhs, as well as the Saudi Sheikhs and even folks like Gaddafi and Ataturk.  Better it is to work with the existing leaders and allow them to lead in the direction you want them to go.  If they aren't going where they need to go then find another local leader who will. Grassroots democracy has got nothing to do with this.

Grassroots, or presbyterian democracy, of the Hatfield and McCoys type only came about when everybody in the country became educated enough to read for themselves AND had access to a variety of ideas so that they could end up deciding for themselves on what the right answers were.

Along the way the decided that the right answers were everybody should be presbyterian, enslaving their own men and children in coal mines was acceptable therefore enslaving blacks was acceptable, burning witches and Catholics was a good thing and that women were property.  A few hundred years later they changed their minds.

Now if we want democracy then prepare for witch burnings.  If we want POGG then work with the existing leadership structure, and be prepared to depose leaders when they go astray.


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## 1feral1 (29 Dec 2006)

You know this is one of the wierdest threads yet on this site!

In a culture and lifelstyle rife with greed, graft, corruption, an ever growing, even almost popular ethnic cleansing, bizarre ritual kidnappings (multiple or single), wholesale murder, extortion, bombings at random, and other cowardly acts too numerous, ghastly and/or too outragous to mention, plus targeting Coalition Forces, on top of it all, I reckon a bit of incest is not going to change much in a place which is going down hill by the second, and where life is as cheap as swatting a mosquito.

I just don't really care.

Its been one freakish day here in Shtyeland, and reading this thread puts a grin on my face, ha! I think there is more colourful things to discuss than cousins marrying each other here in Iraq.


Wes


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## FoverF (29 Dec 2006)

Agreed. 

It's interesting to note, but there are far more pressing issues at the moment.


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