An Overlooked Problem in "Nationbuilding" in Arab Muslim Countries

In a remarkably enlightening and very important article by Steve Sailor, a journalist with a special interest in science, a very important, yet almost uniformly overlooked, obstacle to the advancement of a wider civil society in Arab countries is seen (hat tip to Pastorius at the Infidel Bloggers Alliance:

Cousin Marriage Conundrum

Many prominent neoconservatives are calling on America not only to conquer Iraq (and perhaps more Muslim nations after that), but also to rebuild Iraqi society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the Middle East. Yet, Americans know so little about the Middle East that few of us are even aware of one of one of the building blocks of Arab Muslim cultures -- cousin marriage. Not surprisingly, we are almost utterly innocent of any understanding of how much the high degree of inbreeding in Iraq could interfere with our nation building ambitions.

In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or second cousins to each other. A 1986 study of 4,500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46% were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53% were "consanguineously" married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is that of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.

By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes the development of civil society more difficult. Many Americans have heard by now that Iraq is composed of three ethnic groups -- the Kurds of the north, the Sunnis of the center, and the Shi'ites of the south. Clearly, these ethnic rivalries would complicate the task of ruling reforming Iraq. But that's just a top-down summary of Iraq's ethnic make-up. Each of those three ethnic groups is divisible into smaller and smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families -- each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds. And the engine at the bottom of these bedeviling social divisions is the oft-ignored institution of cousin marriage.

The fractiousness and tribalism of Middle Eastern countries have frequently been remarked. In 1931, King Feisal of Iraq described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea, ? connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever." The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in countries such as Iraq appears to be in tied to the high rates of inbreeding.

Muslim countries are usually known for warm, devoted extended family relationships, but also for weak patriotism. In the U.S., where individualism is so strong, many assume that "family values" and civic virtues such as sacrificing for the good of society always go together. But, in Islamic countries, loyalty to extended (as opposed to nuclear) families is often at war with loyalty to nation. Civic virtues, military effectiveness, and economic performance all suffer.

Commentator Randall Parker wrote, "Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists seem blind to the importance of pre-ideological kinship-based political bonds in large part because those bonds are not derived from abstract Western ideological models of how societies and political systems should be organized. ? Extended families that are incredibly tightly bound are really the enemy of civil society because the alliances of family override any consideration of fairness to people in the larger society. Yet, this obvious fact is missing from 99% of the discussions about what is wrong with the Middle East. How can we transform Iraq into a modern liberal democracy if every government worker sees a government job as a route to helping out his clan at the expense of other clans?"

Retired U.S. Army colonel Norvell De Atkine spent years trying to train America's Arab allies in modern combat techniques. In an article in American Diplomacy entitled, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," a frustrated De Atkine explained, "First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations? In a culture in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle. "Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver," De Atkine continued. "The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership."

Similarly, as Francis Fukuyama described in his 1995 book "Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity," countries such as Italy with highly loyal extended families can generate dynamic family firms. Yet, their larger corporations tend to be rife with goldbricking, corruption, and nepotism, all because their employees don't trust each other to show their highest loyalty to the firm rather than their own extended families. Arab cultures are more family-focused than even Sicily, and thus their larger economic enterprises suffer even more.

American society is so biased against inbreeding that many Americans have a hard time even conceiving of marrying a cousin. Yet, arranged matches between first cousins (especially between the children of brothers) are considered the ideal throughout much of a broad expanse from North Africa through West Asia and into Pakistan and India.

In contrast, Americans probably disapprove of what scientists call "consanguineous" mating more than any other nationality. Three huge studies in the U.S. between 1941 and 1981 found that no more than 0.2% of all American marriages were between first cousins or second cousins.

Americans have long dismissed cousin marriage as something practiced only among hillbillies. That old stereotype of inbred mountaineers waging decades long blood feuds had some truth to it. One study of 107 marriages in Beech Creek, Kentucky in 1942 found 19% were consanguineous, although the Kentuckians were more inclined toward second cousin marriages, while first cousin couples are more common than second cousins pairings in the Islamic lands.

Cousin marriage averages not much more than one percent in most European countries, and under 10% in the rest of the world outside that Morocco to Southern India corridor.

Muslim immigration, however, has been boosting Europe's low level of consanguinity. 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." (Bittles' Web-site www.Consang.net presents the results of several hundred studies of the prevalence of inbreeding around the world.)

European nations have recently become increasingly hostile toward the common practice among their Muslim immigrants of arranging marriages between their children and citizens of their home country, frequently their relatives. One study of Turkish guest-workers in the Danish city of Ish?und that 98% -- 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation -- married a spouse from Turkey who then came and lived in Denmark. (Turks, however, are quite a bit less enthusiastic about cousin marriage than are Arabs or Pakistanis, which correlates with the much stronger degree of patriotism found in Turkey.)

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.

The new Danish right wing government has introduced legislation to crack down on these kind of marriages arranged to generate visas. British Home Secretary David Blunkett has called for immigrants to arrange more marriages within Britain.

Unlike the Middle East, Europe underwent what Samuel P. Huntington calls the "Romeo and Juliet revolution." Europeans became increasingly sympathetic toward the right of a young woman to marry the man she loves. Setting the stage for this was the Catholic Church's long war against cousin marriage, even out to fourth cousins or higher. This weakened the extended family in Europe, thus lessening the advantages of arranged marriages. It also strengthened broader institutions like the Church and the nation-state.

Islam itself may not be responsible for the high rates of inbreeding in Muslim countries. (Similarly high levels of consanguinity are found among Hindus in Southern India, although there, uncle-niece marriages are socially preferred, even though their degree of genetic similarity is twice that of cousin marriages, with worse health consequences for offspring.)

Rafat Hussain, a Pakistani-born Senior Lecturer at the U. of New England in Australia, told me, "Islam does not specifically encourage cousin marriages and, in fact, in the early days of the spread of Islam, marriages outside the clan were highly desirable to increase cultural and religious influence." She adds, "The practice has little do with Islam (or in fact any religion) and has been a prevalent cultural norm before Islam." Inbreeding (or "endogamy") is also common among Christians in the Middle East, although less so than among Muslims.

The Muslim practice is similar to older Middle Eastern norms, such as those outlined in Leviticus in the Old Testament. The lineage of the Hebrew Patriarchs who founded the Jewish people was highly inbred. Abraham said his wife Sarah was also his half-sister. His son Isaac married Rebekah, a cousin once removed. And Isaac's son Jacob wed his two first cousins, Leah and Rachel.

Jacob's dozen sons were the famous progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Due to inbreeding, Jacob's eight legitimate sons had only six unique great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. That's because the inbred are related to their relatives through multiple paths.

Why do so many people around the world prefer to keep marriage in the family? Hussain noted, "In patriarchal societies where parents exert considerable influence and gender segregation is followed more strictly, marriage choice is limited to whom you know. While there is some pride in staying within the inner bounds of family for social or economic reasons, the more important issue is: Where will parents find a good match? Often, it boils down to whom you know and can trust."

Another important motivation -- one that is particularly important in many herding cultures, such as the ancients ones from which the Jews and Muslims emerged -- is to prevent inheritable wealth from being split among too many descendents. This can be especially important when there are economies of scale in the family business.

Just as the inbred have fewer unique ancestors than the outbred, they also have fewer unique heirs, helping keep both the inheritance and the brothers together. When a herd-owning patriarch marries his son off to his younger brother's daughter, he insures that his grandson and his grandnephew will be the same person. Likewise, the younger brother benefits from knowing that his grandson will also be the patriarch's grandson and heir. Thus, by making sibling rivalry over inheritance less relevant, cousin marriage emotionally unites families.

The anthropologist Carleton Coon also pointed out that by minimizing the number of relatives a Bedouin Arab nomad has, this system of inbreeding "does not overextend the number of persons whose deaths an honorable man must avenge."

Of course, there are also disadvantages to inbreeding. The best known is medical. Being inbred increases the chance of inheriting genetic syndromes caused by malign recessive genes. Bittles found that, after controlling for socio-economic factors, the babies of first cousins had about a 30% higher chance of dying before their first birthdays.

The biggest disadvantage, however, may be political.

Are Muslims, especially Arabs, so much more loyal to their families than to their nations because, due to countless generations of cousin marriages, they are so much more genealogically related to their families than Westerners are related to theirs? Frank Salter, a political scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whose new book "Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity" takes a sociobiological look at the reason why Mafia families are indeed families, told me, "That's my hunch; at least it's bound to be a factor."

One of the basic laws of modern evolutionary science, quantified by the great Oxford biologist William D. Hamilton in 1964 under the name "kin selection," is that the more close the genetic relationship between two people, the more likely they are to feel loyalty and altruism toward each other. Natural selection has molded us not just to try to propagate our own genes, but to help our relatives, who possess copies of some of our specific genes, to propagate their own.

Nepotism is thus biologically inspired. Hamilton explained that the level of nepotistic feeling generally depends upon degree of genetic similarity. You share half your personally variable genes with your children and siblings, but one quarter with your nephews/nieces and grandchildren, so your nepotistic urges will tend to be somewhat less toward them. You share one eighth of your genes with your first cousins, and one thirty-second with your second cousin, so your feelings of family loyalty tend to fall off quickly.

But not as quickly if you and your relatives are inbred. Then, you'll be genealogically and related to your kin via multiple pathways. You will all be genetically more similar, so your normal family feelings will be multiplied. For example, your son-in-law might be also be the nephew you've cherished since his childhood, so you can lavish all the nepotistic altruism on him that in an outbred family would be split between your son-in-law and your nephew.

Unfortunately, nepotism is usually a zero sum game, so the flip side of being materially nicer toward your relatives would be that you'd have less resources left with which to be civil, or even just fair, toward non-kin. So, nepotistic corruption is rampant in countries such as Iraq, where Saddam has appointed members of his extended family from his hometown of Tikrit to many key positions in the national government.

Similarly, a tendency toward inbreeding can turn an extended family into a miniature racial group with its own partially isolated gene pool. (Dog breeders use extreme forms of inbreeding to quickly create new breeds in a handful of generations.) The ancient Hebrews provide a vivid example of a partly inbred extended family (that of Abraham and his brothers) that evolved into its own ethnic group. This process has been going on for thousands of years in the Middle East, which is why not just the Jews, but also why tiny, ancient inbreeding groups such as the Samaritans, the John the Baptist-worshipping Sabeans, and the Lucifer-worshipping Yezidis still survive.

In summary, although neoconservatives constantly point to America's success at reforming Germany and Japan after World War II has evidence that it would be easy to do the same in the Middle East, 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. The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Comments

[JasonP]

I remember reading about this shortly after we went into Iraq. Apparently, the troops found that they could get local co-operation by showing respect for the clan leader of these very closely knit clan groups. They were discouraged from doing this by administration policy.

I had hoped that the tribal nature of Iraq would lead to a divide-and-conquer strategy where a scorched-earth policy made an example of one or two tribes (perhaps in Fallujah and Tikrit) while others get benefits for co-operation. The idea was to “bring shame” to one or two tribes that aid jihadi or ex-Baathists while “honoring” those that police their own. Of course, I wasn’t surprised that this bold idea wasn’t discussed anywhere. You can just imagine the outcry (given Abu Graib) if anything remotely like this was done.

Some people suggested a sort of Swiss-type federalism as an alternative to democracy or as a step towards it (local rule before federal rule.) The Kurds seemed to have done something like this. And instead of industries, small businesses seemed a natural fit. Would it have worked? If it’s to keep Iraq free of jihadi, then settling for a traditional tribal order, as oppressive as it is, would have been the path of least resistance.

I assumed that if I was reading about the tribal and intra-family marriages, so was the administration. Obviously, they had their utopian dream. I note on my website a similar dream … 200 years ago … to spread the ideals of the French Revolution to Egypt and Palestine. The guys name was Napoleon. It didn’t go so well.

[Eleanor]

Cubed - Excellent and informative post. Marriage to close relatives is socially and economically logical, but a genetic disaster.

Animal breeders have known this for a long time and are careful. To produce a "well-bred" animal, they carefully pair individuals to create desired characteristics and to prevent problems.

After Hitler's master race, our PC culture has had difficulty thinking about using science to either promote or to avoid characteristics. However, think tanks and those in the corridors of power should have had the foresight to at least make themselves knowledgeable about Middle Eastern tribal cultural norms.

The word tribe conjures up a primative people of simple technology, easily overcome. Obviously they aren't as they have contemporary weapon systems which are merely props, useful tools to benefit and strengthen tribal loyalties.

We are in for a bumpy ride as our president's idealistic foray with the goal and hope of dissolving tribe and clan with scent of democracy over the space of a few years or a few decades is ridiculous.

Why didn't he know? Why didn't THEY know? They are the advisers, the backers that put all politicians into place, that provide the money and the manpower? Why didn't the State Department know? And why aren't educated Americans given the opportunity to know of such things?

Knowledge is only worthwhile when put into the context of the real world, to solve real-world problems, We've blundered into a hornet's nest without knowledge of hornets and almost unarmed. And the hornets are swarming from near and far...

[Cubed]

"I remember reading about this shortly after we went into Iraq."

Jason, I certainly wish I had known about this that early in the game.

I truly had no idea that such inbreeding still existed on such a scale anywhere in the world, outside of some isolated tribes in very remote locations!

It certainly would have hastened my understanding of what was going on.

According to Steve Sailor, the author, there is rising concern among some Saudi doctors about the incidence of genetic disorders resulting from the practice. Now that many ordinary infectious etc. diseases are coming under control, the genetic disorders are more noticeable.

I don't know which ones are seen in Arab societies, but in Pakistan, the incidence of microcephaly is very high and increasing due to inbreeding.

In Europe a couple of thousand years ago, there was a similar practice of "keeping it in the family" through marriage with members of one's own tribe, with marriages outside the tribe taking place mostly to cement dynastic alliances etc.

Despite my interest in ancient history, sociobiology, and genetics, I was also unaware of the "Romeo and Juliet revolution" mentioned by the author, where marrying for love, rather for politics, was encouraged by the Church's opposition to marriages between close relatives.

He points out that increased numbers of marriages outside the family "weakened the extended family (e.g. the tribe) in Europe, thus lessening the advantages of arranged marriages...it [also] strengthened broader institutions like the Church and the nation-state."

DUH! Wish I'd known; it sure would have made the nearly incomprehensible behavior of the Sunni and Shia Muslims, and the resulting intensification of the habit of both groups - er, "tribes" - of referring to everyone else in the world as "The Others," with the same horrified expression as one might regard visitors from another galaxy!

I had heard that expression not long ago when it was the title of a conference held to discuss the "problem" of "The Others." Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it had its origins in what amounts to incest!

I do remember the success stories of some of the troops who developed a relationship with the paterfamilias, and now it all makes sense!

Our Leaders discouraged it? Wow, they're just full of good ideas!

Your idea of a "divide and conquer" strategy makes a lot of sense.

Oh, well. "They" aren't asking any of us for our input!

Eleanor,

I'm so glad you found it helpful; it was a real eye-opener for me, one more important item to throw into the hopper when considering how to deal with Islam.

It's been one avoidable mistake after another because, as you so aptly put it, of the failure of "...think tanks and those in the corridors of power [who] should have had the foresight to at least make themselves knowledgeable about Middle Eastern tribal cultural norms."

Let me see; despite the phenomenal expertise available for consultation, we have 1) "the religion of peace" fiasco, 2) the conviction that, despite the fact that Muslims have absolutely no intellectual history with an Enlightenment-style societal organization, they would immediately welcome one, 3) the total ignorance of the consequences of a fused religion/state entity, 4) the total idiocy of the "Just War Theory" when fighting ANY war with ANY enemy, and now, 5) the complete disregard of the importance of the impact of a tribal society based on inbreeding has on strategy or tactics.

I can understand why I miss stuff; I can't understand why Our Leaders missed it.

I'll bet WWII was better researched than this!

[JasonP]

As you know, Cubed, we have an appreciation for empirical procedures not just that because you, George, and I have backgrounds in science (I don’t know Eleanor’s background but she’s clearly on the ball) but philosophically we appreciate the primacy of existence and understand the consequences of not being in cognitive contact with reality. But unlike some so-called empiricists we know the importance of integrating knowledge into principles and systems.

Too many people, administration and critics, have ideas detached from reality or wallow in a mountain of details without hope.

In any case, I’m sorry I forgot to mention the inter-marriage. Actually I didn’t have the exact number but from the description I knew it was large. I remembered the “tribal” aspect but didn’t fully realize the biological consequences.

[Always On Watch]

I've read that the UAE has quite a number of retarded children. One article I read (Smithsonian Magazine mentioned inbreeding as a factor. I should have saved that article!