(This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)
But it's certainly a way of concentrating power in the family. And presumably, for a very long time, having lots of grandsons of undivided loyalty was important in conflicts with the neighbouring family/tribe... worth the individual fitness cost (and the extra miscarriages etc -- many of these strange illnesses would of course have killed the child).
It can trivially be seen to have little to do with islam in examples like the House of Habsburg, and the famously ignominous end of the Spanish line. Or orthodox jews (the endogamous set is wider than just a family, but you still see lots of rare genetic conditions crop up, and some jewish communities don't even stray outside of it e.g. Mashhadi jews).
Though it does look related to Arabization.
While first-degree cousin marriage has gotten quite a bit rarer used to be extremely common across the globe, and aside from the middle-east it also remains legal throughout eurasia (except for a few eastern european countries and notably china where it's entirely banned and india where it's dependent on culture and religion) and south america
> IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition
It's less common but hardly non-existent: according to Shrikant Kuntla, Srinivas Goli, T.V. Sekher, Riddhi Doshi via wikipedia[0] rate of consanguinous marriage is 25% of indian muslims, 15% for indian hindu, and under 10% for other indians. State / culture presents a much wider spread, from 1.2% in Himachal Pradesh to 38% in Tamil Nadu.
While British Pakistanis are responsible for 3% of all births, they account for 30% of British children born with a genetic illness.
Cousin marriages in the UK are 1/200 for White couples, but 2/3 for Pakistani couples.
The solution is to ban cousin marriages. It is unfair on the rest of society to have to shoulder the burden of excess healthcare costs, caused by the outdated and harmful cultural practices of immigrants.
It's my understanding that cousin-marriage was rare among european Jews, but a bit more common elsewhere. (Not sure if as high as the surrounding peoples, not sure.) There are indeed rare and interesting genetic conditions in some Jewish groups, but that's another story.
(Am surprised by Tamil Nadu's 38%, thanks. But certainly north-indians take dowry pretty seriously, while avoiding cousins.)
Yes, India seems extremely split between the north and the south, northern cultures have disapproved of it or forbidden it forever while southern states much less so.
In Hindu families too it was not that uncommon at all, though this trend has declined in the current generation marriages.
Not so much banned it, as restricted it: dispensations were fairly common among the nobility and royalty, who could afford the fees charged by the Church for the privilege.
And not just cousin marriage, either: marriages between uncle and niece were hardly unknown. For an example somewhat after the Middle Ages, have a look at the family tree of Charles II of Spain [0]: his father and mother were uncle and niece, as were his paternal great-grandparents and his maternal great-great-grandparents. He was descended in 14 different ways from Philip I and Joanna of Castile, at a remove of five, six or seven generations. Of his 16 great-great-great-grandmothers, Anna of Bohemia and Hungary was four of them (and also four of his 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers). And so on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain#Ancestry
Their family trees are weird and alien to us because we live in this new world. Whereas I don't think many of his subjects thought that Saddam Hussein's family tree was freak-show material.
See the image on page 3 of this pdf.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ghazi_Tadmouri/publicat...
Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs
'The Labour MP Ann Cryer has called for British Pakistanis to stop marrying their first cousins... Speaking to the Guardian, Ms Cryer said: "I'm not calling for a ban or a change in the law because that would mean changing the law for everyone. I'm simply calling for an enlightened debate. We've avoided discussions on this subject. People are being politically correct.'
Is this left versus right thing? I note that the quote you provide comes from a centre left source.
It's not a new phenomenon. Before racial/ethnic issues came to the forefront, partisans used religion and other relevant ideologies.
Labour is the only party apart from the BNP to be investigated over allegations of racism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
This is an internal matter and has no bearing on who might be leading the country in a few weeks and voters don't have a right to know and the Tories don't have a right to point it out? Ok then.
(n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmacist. I did my pre-registration work at the -- now closed -- district hospital in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town of roughly 60,000 people. Dewsbury is in a steep valley and the working-class population tended not to travel: according to an older relative who worked there all his life, he knew co-workers who had been born, worked, lived, and retired in Dewsbury without ever travelling more than ten miles away from their birthplace. (Automobiles didn't really become a mass-cultural phenomenon there until the 1950s-1960s.) Cue lots of first-cousin marriages. During the 1970s, a Pakistani immigrant community arrived ... also from an isolated mountain valley town that didn't have much time for exogamy.
The hospital serving a city of 60,000 people shouldn't have a 30-bed cystic fibrosis ward (CF is an inborn error of metabolism) ... but Dewsbury needed one. (CF has a frequency of roughly 1 in 3000 in Northern Europe, so you'd expect 20 living cases in a town the size of Dewsbury: but they wouldn't need hospital beds simultaneously! The local frequency was much higher.) Nor should it have exotic conditions like familial hypobetalipoproteinaemia showing up in the population. Again, Dewsbury had that. In fact, Dewsbury was so notorious for genetic disorders that house officers and registrars training in the relevant fields got rotated there from the big teaching hospitals in Leeds (the nearest big city).
Upshot: if you get geographically isolated communities with religious cultures that discourage exogamy, you get really weird genetic disorders cropping up within surprisingly few generations.