It appears to be the main resource on this topic as it’s cited by a lot of other research, including this report about consanguine marriage in Norway. The report is in Norwegian, so most of you will just have to trust me when I say that it shows for births in Norway a 30 % increase in the risk of stillbirth and about a doubling in infant mortality and congenital disorders in cousin marriages, with very minor differences between Norwegian couples and Pakistani couples.
Well if this blog is any indication it seems that at least in the UK there is dissention among Muslim youths in regard to cousin marriage. Sounds pretty predictable honestly that now through slow but steady process of exposure to new cultures and ideas that younger Muslim immigrants and children and grandchildren of immigrants would begin to question the wisdom of cousin marriage, I wonder if the youth are developing a similar outlook back in their countries of origin, if at a slower pace.
Back before modern transportation and ease of movement, when most people were born, lived, and died in the same village, everyone was relatively inbred by modern standards. After a few centuries you’re pretty much related to everyone else whose family has lived in the same area for that time.
The best solution to a preponderance of first cousin marriages is to make it easier for people to travel. That greatly increases the chances they’ll marry outside the immediate area and thus avoid first cousin (or closer!) marriages. It may take a couple generations to make a big impact, but it’s the least coercive method I can think of, and few are going to push back against it.
The next town was full of inbreeds, our town called there town the land of the inbreed.
Not all were inbreed but a lot were.
Some inbreeds in our town and everyone knew who they were.
I was talking to an old mate and talking about a relation of his and he came out and just said there was a big problem with inbreeds from the country he came from and that’s why there are so many of them that are just such idiots.
I just thought well that explains it.
Basically, the invention of the bicycle spelled the beginning of the end for the village idiot. Now, it became practical to court someone from a village 10km or 20km away, and still be home in time for dinner.
Where inbreeding remains a problem, we’re talking about isolated rural areas, often coupled with tribal or clan conventions about who can marry who, and cultures formed by these.
As it happens, this accurated describes large parts of rural Pakistan, and the inhabitants of those parts are overwhelmingly Muslims. But it’s a mistake to see inbreeding as a problem of Islam; there’s nothing in the faith to dictate inbreeding. It’s cultural factors other than religion which mainly account for it.
Faith does predict inbreeding in some ways, with Catholicism and Orthodoxy explicitly defining it while some Protestant faiths have been more cavalier. First cousin marriage is forbidden (although you probably could’ve requested a dispensation), second cousin marriage is fine.
And in some cultures it is okay to marry some first cousins but not others, depending on the gender of your parent and of the sibling that is the cousin’s parent.
Surreal, is your list among the total population, including the non-Muslims, for all countries? I am specifically wondering about Lebanon.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that Catholicism and Orthodoxy “explicitly define” inbreeding. I’m not sure that they do. And, even if they do, you can define something for the purpose of forbidding it, or for the purpose of permitting it, or indeed for the purpose of taking some other explicit stance on it.
Nearly all cultures have rules of exogamy (identifying a group of persons within which you may not marry) and most also have rules of endogamy (identifying a larger group of persons within which you should marry; e.g. you should marry within your race, or within your faith, or within your nationality, or within your social class. Or all of these).
The group that you may not marry tends to be quite small, and defined by their relationship to you - e.g. you may not marry your sibling. The purpose of rules of exogamy is not purely eugenic, but also social. Genetically, there is no problem with marrying your sister-in-law but, socially, if you regard your sister-in-law as a potential mate, that’s very destablising to the family, so there are strong cultural (and sometimes legal) prohibitions. (There’s a reason she’s called your sister-in-law; that’s how you’re supposed to think of her.)
First cousins tend to fall around the boundary of the exogamy group; some cultures forbid first-cousin marriages, others permit them but frown upon them or discourage them in other ways; still others are relaxed about them.
The difference between Catholic and Orthodox Christians on the one hand and Protestant Christians on the other is not really a matter of different attitudes to first-cousin marriages but rather different beliefs about who gets to formalise the rules. At the time of the reformation Protestants tended to take the view that regulating marriage was a matter for the Magistrates, i.e. the civil power. They ought to respect God’s Law ™, naturally, but it was a matter for them to do so, not for the Pastors. Therefore, most Protestant denominations have no formal rules about exactly who may marry and who may not; they respect the civil law on this point. (This attitude may be tested by the introduction of SSM, but that’s a story for another thread.) Whereas the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always been a bit more assertive. (“We’ll marry who we think we ought to marry, and if the civil authorities don’t want to recognise that well, that’s a pity, but it won’t stop us celebrating the marriage. And conversely, we’ll decline to marry those we don’t think we should marry, even if the marriage would be fine under civil law”.) So Catholic and Orthodox canon law does deal with degrees of affinity for marriage.
But none of this is really relevant to the problem of inbreeding. Even if your culture’s exogamous rules allow you to marry your first cousin, they don’t require you to. It’s the endogamous rules which may produce a high rate of cousin marriage. If there’s a cultural expectation that you will marry within your clan, it may very well be that most of the clan members of the right age and gender will be related to you. And this may be reinforced by economic considerations if, e.g., there’s a desire to keep inheritances not only with the clan but within the extended family.
AK84 mentioned that rates of cousin marriage were sometimes even higher in emigrant communities than at home. This is because, if you have emigrated from rural Pakistan to, say, Birmingham, only a small part of your clan is in Birmingham and (since migration decisions tend to be influenced by family relationship) there’s an even higher likelihood that they are related to you. Even if you look back to Pakistan to find a spouse, family networks being what they are, and working as they do, you’re more likely to find a clan member who is related to you than one who is not.
The problem, in short, is not that in certain cultures cousin marriages are permitted; it’s that in certain cultures, in certain circumstances, they are strongly encouraged. And while it suits some to identify this as a problem of Muslims, in fact Islam has very little to do with it. You might just as well identify obesity as a problem of Christians.
That as he said, marriage between first cousins is explicitly forbidden as being between people who are too closely related, although a dispensation may be requested. These usually get granted, it’s a way to ask people “are you sure, sure, sure, but absolutely, completely and utterly sure, that you want to marry your cousin and not somebody else?”
Link explaining it, and itself containing the link to the appropriate canon law. Note that other sites say marriage among second cousins is forbidden: their writers are not counting right. The ban is for relatives up to the fourth degree (cousins); a second cousin is a relative in the sixth degree.
Now, you also bring up other cultural constraints - but they are other, they are additional. My Catalan relatives are as Catholic or not as my Basque/Navarrese ones, but the first group considers cousin marriage acceptable whereas the second sees third cousins as barely acceptable; the Catalan countryside is more easily accessible by traditional means than the hills and mountains of the southern (=Spanish) Basque areas, which even without adding things like language and sense of humor makes it easier to get new blood into the family tree and thus compensate for an occasional bit of consanguinity.
According to a Bolivian Dentist, half of the world’s pool tables are misleveled.
According to a Kazakh Plumber, half of the world’s guitars are out of tune.
According to a Nigerian Prince, half of the world’s money is in hidden accounts.