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Source/Credit: The Friday Times
By A Faris | July 15, 2011
Cousin marriages are derided and ridiculed in Britain. But in much of the world they are still common. A Faris, whose parents are first cousins, writes about his experience
Professor Steve Jones, a biologist at University College London, ignited an obnoxious political storm recently by seeming to suggest that "inbreeding" amongst British Muslims had a harmful effect on their heath. Jones, speaking at the Hay festival of Literature and Arts, said:
"There may be some evidence that cousins marrying one another can be harmful. We should be concerned about that as there can be a lot of hidden genetic damage. Children are much more likely to get two copies of a damaged gene. It is common in the Islamic world to marry your brother's daughter, which is actually closer than marrying your cousin." "Bradford" he added, "is very inbred. There is a huge amount of cousins marrying each other there."
Well, nobody was going to let this one lie. Muslim groups up and down the country issued vociferous condemnations of the professor's statements, accusing him of feeding off stereotypes and failing to exhibit cultural sensitivity.
Not to be outdone, the right wing press in Britain swiftly jumped on the dubious bandwagon with the country's least self-deprecating tabloid, the Daily Star, choosing to run their story with this risible riposte: "Muslims are inbreeding so much it is causing birth defects in British babies".
The whole preposterous episode reminded me of an awfully traumatic experience I once had at primary school, where I rather dim-wittedly announced to my all-white middle class lunch companions that my parents happened to be first cousins. I really don't know why I chose to disclose this particular piece of information, but I did. Perhaps my eight-year old brain labored under the delusion that the revelation would be greeted with gasps of delight, the outsider's awe and wonder at the exotic singularity of my situation. Well, they certainly thought me exotic, but in a more European-settlers-encounter-Native-American-Indians kind of way.
From being the not-so-white-one in my class, I became the little brown oddity from the Orient. "My dad's a policeman you know," one girl haughtily told me, "an inspector in fact. He will have the lot of you hanged and quartered before you can say 'marry me cousin.'" The menace in her voice caused terrified beads of sweat to scamper from every pore of my inbred body. There I was, a somewhat tubby perspiring school kid with 'cousin child' written all over my forehead. No one would look at me, not even my teacher, who had decided that the best way to confront this abominable scandal was to ignore me altogether. To cap it all, I faced the prospect of a rather hefty prison term. My parents had a lot to answer for.
And so my relationship with my cousiness began. First there came the existential crises. "My dad is also my uncle, which means I'm my own cousin and cousin to my brother and sister." The confusion of whose cousin I actually was even left my genes in a tizzy. Then there was the constant checking for any genetic abnormalities. Did I have webbed feet? No. Did I have more fingers than the average person? Not to my knowledge. Did I have more hair on my elbow than I ought to? Possibly... Was my left eye slightly bigger than my right? Yes - yes it was! Frankenstein's monster never suffered such visceral horrors.
The shame of my parents' kinship didn't stay with me for long. The older I got the less it mattered, until, by the time I was in secondary school, it disappeared into the void of the inconsequential. It was a part of me, but I wasn't defined by it. Today as someone approaching my thirties I am fully reconciled with my inbred status. I am fairly healthy, I don't have three legs, and I am certainly not "an inbred clone child... addled with the inbred look" as one poster in the New Statesman website put it. (At least I hope not anyway.) Nor, as others have suggested, does my befuddled gene pool incline me towards terrorism and mass murder, unless using mosquito repellent counts. In short, I consider myself a normal person in every way; it is just that my parents happen to be cousins, and presently as I find myself in Pakistan, that makes me even more normal than usual.
More importantly, on a conceptual level, I am entirely at ease with the idea of cousin marriages. In modern, secular and capitalist societies, the thought of marrying within one's family may have become redundant because of more individual freedoms and greater economic independence as well as the diminishing role of family ties, but this ideal cannot be imposed on tighter-knit, agrarian, or geographically isolated communities that are dependent on inter-family marriages. It makes sense then for Islam, which professes to be a religion for the entire world, to permit spousal relations between cousins because there is no one homogenous type of Muslim community. While Professor Jones' comments may have had some basis in scientific fact, they betray a lack of appreciation for the exigencies and cultural realities which define significant portions of the world's population. And it's not just Muslims. Cousin marriage is also common among many Hindus, Christian conservatives and tribal communities the world over. Also, his suggestion that men in the Islamic world tend to marry their brother's daughter was quite frankly absurd.
In a few weeks the furor will die down and the world will move on. Steve Jones will go back to lecturing at UCL, perhaps a more tactful man for his experiences, and the British press will be on the hunt for the latest controversy. As for me: I will remain the child of parents who are cousins. But, unlike my eight-year old self, I will no longer allow myself be cowed by those who would seek to treat me as a Pariah.
A Faris is a freelance contributor
Read original post here: Auntie? Uncle? Folks?
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