The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative silence about it reveals the “unspeakable face of liberalism” according to Matthew Syed in The Times. And it seems lots of others agree with him.
Formerly in the historical deep freeze, it’s the fact that cousin marriage occurs disproportionately in British Muslim communities that has turned it into a hot button issue. Syed — himself of Pakistani extraction — first drew attention to its prevalence in an influential column last year, reminding us that where cousin marriage is practised over several generations, it exposes couples to a significantly heightened risk of bearing children with autosomal recessive disorders. Obstetricians in isolated rural communities have always known this, and now modern access to gene mapping is emphasising the risk.
