Posted by
Temlakos on Saturday, February 17, 2007 10:34:33 AM
Stanley Kurtz
argues that the most dangerous aspect of Arab Islamic society is its preference for parallel-cousin marriage--that is to say, when cousins marry cousins strictly from the
paternal family line. (A cousin on your father's side is a parallel cousin; a cousin on your mother's side is a cross cousin.) Tellingly, the region of the world in which parallel-cousin marriage predominates happens to coincide with the original Baghdad Caliphate. The danger: a society having such a preference loses its fellow-feeling with other societies and inevitably regards itself as at war with them.
I always knew that Islam was pan-Arab nationalism in religious dress. Kurtz now argues that it is actually Hatfield-McCoy-style clan-ism in religious dress.
He promises a further essay on the subject, in which I presume he will offer a solution. I can only speculate now, but perhaps one of his suggestions will be to strengthen all laws in this country that forbid cousin to marry cousin--or at least forbid the marriage of parallel cousins, as opposed to cross cousins.