Muslim Inbreeding

1400 Years of Inbreeding. A huge Muslim problem.

Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who has done extensive research into a little-known problem in the Muslim world: the disastrous results of Muslim inbreeding brought about by the marriage of first-cousins.

This practice, which has been prohibited in the Judeo-Christian tradition since the days of Moses, was sanctioned by Muhammad and has been going on now for 50 generations (1,400 years) in the Muslim world.

This practice of inbreeding will never go away in the Muslim world, since Muhammad is the ultimate example and authority on all matters, including marriage.

The massive inbreeding in Muslim culture has done irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to its intelligence, sanity, and health.

Close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred. In Pakistan , the numbers approach 70%. Even in England, more than half of Pakistani immigrants are married to their first cousins, and in Denmark the number of inbred Pakistani immigrants is around 40%.

The numbers are equally devastating in other important Muslim countries: 67% in Saudi Arabia , 64% in Jordan , and Kuwait , 63% in Sudan , 60% in Iraq , and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar .

According to the BBC, this Pakistani, Muslim-inspired inbreeding is thought to explain the probability that a British Pakistani family is more than 13 times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders. While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of the births in the UK , they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.

The risk of what are called autosomal recessive disorders such as cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy is 18 times higher and the risk of death due to malformations is 10 times higher.

Other negative consequences of inbreeding include a 100 percent increase in the risk of stillbirths and a 50% increase in the possibility that a child will die during labor.

Lowered intellectual capacity is another devastating consequence of Muslim marriage patterns. According to Sennels, research shows that children of consanguineous marriages lose 10-16 points off their IQ and that social abilities develop much slower in inbred babies. The risk of having an IQ lower than 70, the official demarcation for being classified as "retarded," increases by an astonishing 400 percent among children of cousin marriages. (Similar effects were seen in the Pharaonic dynasties in ancient Egypt and in the British royal family, where inbreeding was the norm for a significant period of time.)

In Denmark , non-Western immigrants are more than 300 percent more likely to fail the intelligence test required for entrance into the Danish army.

Sennels says that "the ability to enjoy and produce knowledge and abstract thinking is simply lower in the Islamic world." He points out that the Arab world translates just 330 books every year, about 20% of what Greece alone does.

In the last 1,200 years of Islam, just 100,000 books have been translated into Arabic, about what Spain does in a single year. Seven out of 10 Turks have never even read a book.

Sennels points out the difficulties this creates for Muslims seeking to succeed in the West. "A lower IQ, together with a religion that denounces critical thinking makes it harder for  Muslims to have success in our high-tech knowledge societies."

Only nine Muslims have ever won the Nobel Prize, and five of those were for the "Peace Prize." According to Nature magazine, Muslim countries produce just 10 percent of the world average when it comes to scientific research measured by articles per million in habitants.

In Denmark , Sennels' native country, Muslim children are grossly over represented among children with special needs. One-third of the budget for Danish schools is consumed by special education, and anywhere from 51% to 70% of retarded children with physical handicaps in Copenhagen have an immigrant background. Learning ability is severely affected as well. Studies indicated that 64% of school children with Arabic parents are still illiterate after 10 years in the Danish school system. The immigrant drop-out rate in Danish high schools is twice that of the native-born.

Mental illness is also a product. The closer the blood relative, the higher the risk of schizophrenic illness. The increased risk of insanity may explain why more than 40% of patients in Denmark 's biggest ward for clinically insane criminals have an immigrant background.

The U.S. is not immune. According to Sennels, "One study based on 300,000 Americans shows that the majority of Muslims in the USA have a lower income, are less educated, and have worse jobs than the population as a whole."

Sennels concludes:

There is no doubt that the wide spread tradition of first cousin marriages among Muslims has harmed the gene pool among Muslims. Because Muslims' religious beliefs prohibit marrying non-Muslims and thus prevents them from adding fresh genetic material to their population, the genetic damage done to their gene pool since their prophet allowed first cousin marriages 1,400 years ago are massive. This has produced overwhelming direct and indirect human and societal consequences.

Bottom line: Islam is not simply a benign and morally equivalent alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Sennels points out, the first and biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Simple Judeo-Christian compassion for Muslims and a common-sense desire to protect Western civilization from the ravages of Islam dictate a vigorous opposition to the spread of this dark and dangerous religion. These stark realities must be taken into account when we establish public polices dealing with immigration from Muslim countries and the building of mosques in the U.S.

Muslim Inbreeding is a Huge Problem–And People Don’t Want to Talk About It

• In Culture
• November 10, 2017
• Jon Miltimore
• 3 comments

Recently I was discussing culture with an educated person whom I respect. Over bourbon, we talked about various matters, including religion. The conversation was interesting but uneventful until he dropped this line.

“You do know half of the Arab world is inbred, right?”

It was a jarring line. It sounded both coarse and false. I politely answered that, no, I was not aware of this particular fact. I must have been smirking, because he persisted. “It’s true. Look it up.”

It was at this point I expressed skepticism. Perhaps he meant some villages in the Arab or Muslim world? Nope, he said.

I said I’d look into the matter, something I did several weeks later. To my surprise, I found an abundance of information on the subject. To my embarrassment, I found that my friend was pretty much right. Reliable research suggests consanguineous marriage rates in many Arab nations are as high as 50 percent.

How did I not know this? I decided to keep investigating.

A Google search of “Islam Inbreeding” will lead one to the case of Salha al-Hefthi, a 17-year-old Saudi girl who was profiled by the New York Times in 2003. Ms. Hefthi’s parents told her how lucky she was to be marrying someone from her own tribe, her paternal uncle’s son—her first cousin. The couple had two healthy boys but their third child, a girl, was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that usually is fatal. The couple would have three more children born with the disease.

Ms. Hefthi told the Times she had no idea inbreeding often leads to genetic defects. This is not uncommon in Saudi Arabia, which is why genetic disorders are so rampant.

“Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory,” Dr. Stephen R. Schroeder, executive director of the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research, told the Times. “Here you can study 10 families to study genetic disorders, where you would need 10,000 families to study genetic disorders in the United States.”

But it’s not just Saudi Arabia, or the Middle East for that matter. Inbreeding is surprisingly common in many Muslim nations and communities, evidence shows.

About 40 percent of the population marries a cousin in Egypt, according to a 2016 report in The Economist, while the percentage in Jordan is 32 percent.

“Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait,” says the Economist.

A 2005 BBC survey found that 55 percent of Britain’s huge Pakistani population was married to a first cousin.

There are at least two reasons inbreeding is so common in parts of the Muslim world (in addition to ignorance of its link to genetic defects): tradition and religion.

In many parts of the Islamic world, it’s considered unusual if not offensive to marry someone outside of one’s family or tribe. The pressure to marry a family member can be intense.

A 38-year-old Egyptian woman with two sons suffering from micro-syndrome, for example, explained to the Economist how she was criticized by relatives for allowing her teenage daughter to marry “a stranger” instead of a family member.

But the pressure can go beyond mere criticism. In recent years, European nations have seen young Muslim women killed for refusing to marry a family member. Honor killings, such as this 21-year-old Kurdish woman in Germany who was gunned down at a wedding after declining an arranged marriage with her cousin, are rare. But they demonstrate the emphasis Islamic culture places on “keeping it in the family.”

The precedent for consanguineous marriage comes from the Qur’an itself. Following his military conquests, the prophet Muhammad famously married his cherished daughter Fatimah to his cousin Ali, an act that was shown to be a great honor.

“I have married you to the dearest of my family to me,” Muhammed told Ali.

In fact, cousins are not even considered blood relatives in the Islamic tradition because the Qur’an does not forbid or condemn marriage between cousins. Here is what is said in chapter 4, verse 23 of the religious text:

“Prohibited to you (For marriage) are:- Your mothers, daughters, sisters; father’s sisters, Mother’s sisters; brother’s daughters, sister’s daughters; foster-mothers (Who gave you suck), foster-sisters; your wives’ mothers; your step-daughters under your guardianship, born of your wives to whom ye have gone in,- no prohibition if ye have not gone in;- (Those who have been) wives of your sons proceeding from your loins; and two sisters in wedlock at one and the same time, except for what is past; for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”

 

As a result of this long religious tradition, convincing Muslims to stop the practice of inbreeding has proven difficult.  

“My dad would not accept that being married to his cousin could have affected his children,” said Aisha Khan, a 36-year-old Pakistani woman who lives in the UK and lost two siblings to genetic diseases. “He’d say, ‘The doctors are wrong. It’s in the hands of God.’”

But inbreeding is an issue that needs to be addressed, some European leaders say. The problem is that genetic deficiencies from consanguineous marriages is taxing European healthcare systems.

The BBC’s research, for example, found that that while British Pakistanis accounted for roughly 3.4% of all births, “they had 30% of all British children with recessive disorders and a higher rate of infant mortality.”

One study found that each year 700 babies in the UK are born with genetic disabilities as a result of consanguineous marriage. Despite this epidemic of genetic defects in babies born from consanguineous marriages, there remains a reluctance in many Islamic leaders to acknowledge the full ramifications of marriage between cousins (see below).

 

 

However, it should be noted that one of the impediments to addressing the issue of consanguineous marriage and its side-effects has nothing to do with Muslims. A serious problem, some critics say, is the inability of Western thought leaders to give the issue sufficient attention. Many, it seems, are hesitant to broach the subject, perhaps out of fear they’ll be mocked as xenophobic or portrayed as an Islamophobe. That won’t do, critics say.

“It’s a public health issue and we deal with public health issues by raising awareness, by talking about subjects such as obesity, such as drug addiction, such as alcohol,” Ann Cryer, a former British Labour Party politician, told The Telegraph. “But for some reason we’re told that we mustn’t talk about cousin marriages because this is a sensitive issue.”

The dialogue raises an important question: If we can’t talk about sensitive cultural issues, how are people of diverse backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities ever going to live together peacefully?