Why cousin marriage endures

The prevalence of first-cousin marriage among people of Pakistani heritage is one of those things that is so shocking to most British people that the statistics themselves sound racist. As with so many things that sound racist, they were simply never mentioned until fairly recently — either by government or by the media.  

This was so much the case that when the issue sprang into public consciousness over the last year, a great deal of the public were astonished to discover that the phenomenon existed at all. That it has even become an acceptable issue for mainstream media to touch, albeit reluctantly, is a result of the rape gang scandal which brought the issue of tightly-knit Mirpuri families to public attention. 

Last December, when the Tory MP Richard Holden introduced a bill under the 10-Minute Rule to ban cousin marriage, many people were astonished to hear independent MP Iqbal Mohammed completely unashamedly defending it as a cultural practice of the Pakistani community to which the public and state should be sensitive. The bill was defeated by Labour, but it made it impossible to claim that cousin marriage wasn’t considered a norm among British Pakistanis. 

It butts up against “normal” British assumptions

There are a number of different prisms through which the matter is being considered, as it butts up against “normal” British assumptions. Most immediately, there is the problem of the huge increase in the risk of birth defects for children born to parents who share grandparents, especially if those grandparents themselves shared grandparents.  

A child born to non-consanguineous parents has eight great-grandparents and sixteen great-great-grandparents; a child born as a result of two successive generations of consanguineous marriage may have as few as two great-grandparents and four great-great grandparents. And plenty of Pakistani families have been practicing first-cousin marriage for many more generations than that. The practice of polygamy in adds some much needed depth to the gene pool, although multiple wives are just as likely to be first cousins to one another as they are to their shared husband. 

Homozygosity and the accumulation of deleterious recessive alleles mean that Pakistanis, despite accounting for only 3-4 per cent of live births in the UK, account for around a third of all children born with serious birth defects. Both from an ethical point of view, and from the point of view of excess costs to the health service (not to mention other benefits), there seems a powerful medical argument in favour of state intervention.  But not all are convinced. The former leader of the Tories in Bradford — one of the most acutely affected areas — pointed out that first cousin marriage is less likely to result in birth defects than having children over the age of 40. Would we consider banning that? 

The more practical argument against a ban on cousin marriage is that merely marrying your cousin isn’t the issue, it’s having children by your cousin that creates the risk of birth defects. Unless an expectant mother is significantly underage, or claims to have been raped, the authorities will not look into paternity, and it is no longer uncommon for the father’s details to be left blank on a birth certificate. Whilst pious Muslims would not have children out of wedlock, it is marriage in the eyes of the faith and the community that matters to them, not the civil recognition by the British authorities.  Being married in the eyes of English Law is an administrative convenience, especially in terms of spouse visas, but little more. It stopped being an essential component of having a child here a long time ago. 

But for Labour and many self-styled “centrists”, all of this is too much to consider. We have now had a generation or more in which they have made it imperative to remove “stigma” around people’s choices in terms of sex and relationships, especially if those choices are associated with ethnicity or race. That one of Britain’s largest ethnic minorities has been found to engage in a custom which, notwithstanding the medical consequences, is inherently revolting to most English people, is more than they can bear. For them, the entire subject is simply racist, let alone any specific opinions or policies one may come up with about it.  They want it to go away, and the easiest way to do that is to stick firmly to the liberal line that whom people marry and have children with is their own business. 

As a result, cousin marriage is now in the same drawer as questions such as the wearing of the niqab, which divide liberal opinion between those who emphasise the autonomy of minority communities and those who place primacy on the individual. This is mainly a debate going on among people who consider themselves “progressive” in one manner or another. As such, their arguments tend to be couched in the language and assumptions of the Left.  Many conservatives and populists are naturally in favour of banning what they regard as a backward foreign practice as a matter of principle, but they are happy to amplify arguments for doing so on grounds that sound more enlightened and humanistic if others are already articulating them. 

So we begin to see the argument that cousin marriage is a patriarchal imposition on the autonomy of individual women of Pakistani heritage, forcing them into marrying cousins with the risk of giving birth to unhealthy babies. Surely, they reason, no woman could possibly want that for herself, or for her potential children. It is a coercive practice, designed to shore up the power of the male elders of clans, by marrying their own offspring together.  This is an argument which many progressives, especially male ones, know they have to treat far more cautiously than those from the Right which can be dismissed as racist or stigmatising. Especially since any perceived disregard for the specific rights of women from “marginalised” cultures risks making them look like the racist ones. 

This followed on from the public debate around the niqab earlier this year, in which nominally left-leaning or liberal feminists seemed to make the argument more stridently and confidently than they had done previously; that full face veiling was patriarchal and oppressive, and that a secular society had a duty to intervene. Unlike their counterparts in other English-speaking countries, the success of British feminists in halting and reversing the tide of gender ideology has clearly made many of them far less patient of other parts of any so-called progressive coalition insofar as they might infringe on the freedom and autonomy of women — and a bloody good show too. 

Sadly, while the paradigm of patriarchy vs. autonomy might be effective dialectically in the context of British politics, in the case of both cousin marriage and the niqab, it is completely misapplied. It is not so much based on a misunderstanding of how human culture works, rather than a comprehensive disregarding of culture entirely. What began as a necessary and salutary backlash against cultural relativism on the Left a couple of decades ago, has become a lazy habit of simply neglecting the importance of culture.

To put it as crudely as possible, people who grew up in cultures where cousin marriage is normal, find cousin marriage normal. There does appear to be some instinctive, genetic trait hardwired into humans universally that we are (generally) not sexually attracted to the people we grew up with in the immediate family unit. But beyond that, all practices around pairing, courtship, marriage and procreation of children are subject to cultural custom, which are shaped according to the structures, needs and philosophy of that society. These customs vary massively across the world, from culture to culture. Unless they have extensive exposure to some alternative culture, almost nobody finds the customs of their own native culture creepy or weird. That is the nature of culture; it establishes norms that are, well, normal — at least to the people who live in it. 

Something like the niqab is an even more clear cut example of classical in-group social signalling.  Most obviously, wearing the niqab is a signal of piety, which is its own reward, and is an enhancement to female status within religious communities in the eyes of other women, especially older women.  Signals of piety by a daughter or a granddaughter are a particular enhancement to the status of a matriarch. But within the context of an immigrant community, the niqab serves as a far more powerful signifier of place within the broader society — most specifically as a rejection of it.  

Many Pakistani communities in England live in towns that have experienced economic decline and depopulation. What remains of the English communities around them are often those who lacked the wherewithal to leave, and who are afflicted by varying degrees of social and economic dysfunctionality. Unlike Pakistani communities, the local English lacked access to informal credit via extended family structures, and could not set up their own independent businesses. Chronic problems of family breakdown, addiction and low educational attainment, ended up with the Pakistanis regarding the English as dissolute and amoral. Much of this can be seen in the rape gangs scandal. But it also means that a clear signal rejecting mainstream English society is itself an ingroup status signifier among the Pakistani community. The associations of that signal in terms of personal virtue are especially important for women. 

As with many female-specific cultural signifiers, the veil doubles as a status signifier in that it is an impediment to physical labour, thus suggesting the family can afford for its womenfolk not to toil in the fields or in a factory. In our own culture, long painted fingernails serve the same purpose. Although unlike long nails, the niqab can be easily removed indoors, and so does not preclude a life of drudgery inside the home. Yet as physical signifiers of leisure go, it is a relatively unobtrusive one for the wearer, compared with some of the more extreme measures some cultures have gone to such as Chinese foot binding.  

Men have always gained status through demonstrations of their wealth; large houses, extensive lands and fine clothes; thoroughbred horses or fast cars. But it is women, throughout the ages and all over the world, who have cultivated the art form of more subtle signals not only about the wealth their family might have, but also how they might have acquired it. This is why most cultures have discrete concepts of class and wealth.  

There are many theories about why humans have almost uniquely evolved the phenomenon of the menopause, and with it a population of women living beyond their years of fertility — the other species to do so being the killer whale. One theory is that the grandmother exists as a form of social technology to enforce norms. Thinking about the pressure that grandmothers and older women exert over their families in our own society, most of us would think that this is generally for the best. They may encourage us to marry well and to stay married; to choose a respectable and sensible career, and particularly for young men, to avoid frivolous spending and excessive hedonism. 

But we are a culture which has recently undergone vast changes in personal morality and family structure, over a very short period of time. For the most part, these changes represented the empowerment of younger individuals to do other than what their granny would have wanted them to do. Only now after a generation of relative social stability do we once again have grandmothers and mothers made up of those previously rebellious cohorts whose aspirations and expectations for their broods fit the new reality. 

Yet other than the West and the former Communist bloc (especially China), most other societies have not experienced that degree of social change, and older familial hierarchies endure. This is particularly the case in traditional Muslim societies that restrict the role of women outside the home.  There is a temptation among Westerners who are unfamiliar with the reality of family life in Islamic societies to take their pieties at face value, and to assume that men retain the whip hand over women in all aspects of life. But the reality is more nuanced. 

If economic and political life outside the home is the arena of men into which traditional Muslim women seldom stray, then life within the home is their domain. Bottled up, and with far fewer distractions than a modern western woman, a Pakistani wife may devote herself to the stewardship of her household. The surprising result of this is that Pakistani and Middle Eastern husbands are some of the most hen-pecked men on God’s green earth. 

Insistence by Western liberals that everybody basically wants the same as we do ourselves is dishonest and cowardly

I am aware that I have resorted to sweeping generalisation and gender stereotyping over much of this article, and those with advanced media literacy may even have identified certain tropes. May God forgive me. My point is that any analysis which suggests that cultural practices can be enforced by patriarchy alone without considering the role of matriarchy is probably not particularly helpful. 

None of this is to engage in cultural relativism. We should feel confident enough to say that a culture in which women do not feel the need to cover their faces in black cloth with a narrow slit for the eyes is better than one where they do. States, nations and markets are objectively superior to clans as the basis for society. We should insist that cousin marriage in order to perpetuate kinship networks is incompatible with our civilisation, and that those who wish to persist with it can never be English and must leave. The same is doubly true of the barbarian practice of female circumcision. But an insistence by Western liberals that everybody basically wants the same as we do ourselves is dishonest and cowardly, and will bring us no closer to understanding why such things go on.