Kissing Cousins Redux

Dear readers, you know Dinah has long been saying that one of the biggest root causes of terror is consanguinity. (See Kissing Cousins)Stanley Kurtz takes an in depth look at the topic and it is definitely worth a look see. Here's a tease:

"... as we learned in “Marriage and the Terror War,” large sections of the Muslim world prefer to arrange marriages between “parallel cousins,” cousins who are members of the same paternal family line.

In the first part of this piece, I showed that, on a world scale, the radical form of in-marriage represented by the union of parallel cousins is highly unusual. Parallel-cousin marriage is confined almost exclusively to the region once ruled by the original eighth-century Islamic empire, and this involuted form of marriage stands in sharp contrast to the relative value placed on out-marriage, inter-group alliance, and interchange favored by almost every other culture in the world."

Marriage and the Terror War
Marriage and the Terror War II

The series is to be continued and Stanley leaves us with this:

"The “self-sealing” character of Islam is part and parcel of a broader and more deeply rooted social pattern. And parallel-cousin marriage is more than just an interesting but minor illustration of that broader theme. If there’s a “self-sealing” tendency in Muslim social life, cousin marriage is the velcro. In contemporary Europe, perhaps even more than in the Middle East, cousin marriage is at the core of a complex of factors blocking assimilation and driving the war on terror. So I shall take up the question of cousin marriage in Europe in the next series of essays."