Problems with Muslim intermarriage and pregnancy

I recently read SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, which, sadly, was not as good as the original book by the same authors. One thing that did stick with me, though, from this slightly silly, banal book, is the author’s claim that, in the Muslim world there is a common thread binding low-achieving children and adults: Ramadan. It turns out that, although people do eat before sunrise and after sunset during Ramadan, for women in the early stages of pregnancy during that month, the lack of regular daytime nutrition affects the fetus’s development. Those babies don’t thrive either in utero or in the world.

It seems that Muslim babies have another problem: inbreeding. Because of the imprimatur Mohamed put on marriage between first cousins; and because Muslims are tribalists, more than nationalists, which makes tight family bonds important, Muslims have a hugely higher than normal risk of recessive genetic disorders. Worse, because anything that isn’t glowing praise for Islam and Muslims is deemed Islamophobia, with the result that Leftists will berate you and Muslims will kill you, this is not a topic that is ever addressed.  Moral and physical fear drop the fact that generations of children are destroyed by inbreeding.  (And isn’t that funny, because, whether the topic is socialized medicine or illegal immigration, the Leftists always lead with “But what about the children?”)

With the exception of a few ruling families (the Egyptian pharaohs and the Hapsburgs spring to mind), massively isolated communities, and the Islamic world, all other societies have banned incest.  This isn’t because it’s icky.  We think it’s icky because it’s been banned for a gazillion years across all (but a few) communities — and it’s been banned for a reason:  Ancient people may not have been versed in the sciences, but simple observation revealed to them that, if family members had children, those children had problems.  More than that, if this inbreeding spanned several generations, the problems worsened.  The Hapsburgs are a great example because, by the late 16th century, they were routinely giving birth to children who were retarded, insane, or horribly disfigured.  Charles V provides a nice example of the physical damage wrought by inbreeding: