Muslim cousin marriage in Britain

The Guardian reports:

British Pakistanis should stop marrying cousins, says MP

Riazat Butt Wednesday November 16, 2005 The Guardian

The Labour MP Ann Cryer has called for British Pakistanis to stop marrying their first cousins after a study suggested that they were more likely to have children with recessive disorders than the general population. An investigation by BBC Newsnight claims that British Pakistanis account for 30% of all British children with recessive disorders, which include cystic fibrosis. Dr Peter Corry, a consultant paediatrician at Bradford royal infirmary, says his hospital sees a disproportionately high rate of recessive genetic illnesses.

The Times of India reported:

The research, conducted by the BBC and broadcast to a shocked nation on Tuesday, found that at least 55% of the community was married to a first cousin.

This is thought to be linked to the probability that a British Pakistani family is at least 13 times more likely than the general population to have children with recessive genetic disorders.

The research found that while British Pakistanis accounted for just 3.4% of all births, they had 30% of all British children with recessive disorders and a higher rate of infant mortality.

In my "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" article of 2003, I reported that Muslims in Europe use arranged cousin marriages to get around laws restricting immigration:

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." ...

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.

First cousin marriages also lower IQ by a few points on average, which Arabs can't afford. One study found a seven point depression in IQ, but other studies point to maybe half that. In any case, it's one reason that IQs among Caucasian Muslims are lower on average than among other Caucasians.

Of course, this has major implications for the question of the day about why Muslim immigrants aren't integrating into European societies, with everybody who is anybody denouncing European racism. But if the Muslims force their daughters to marry their cousins from the Old Country, they aren't going to engage in the most effective form of integration: inter-ethnic marriage.

A racial group is a partly inbred extended family. Due to cousin marriage, Muslims are particularly inbred within particularly limited extended families, which is a major reason why Muslim cultures are so fractious and integrate so poorly into larger societies.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer