webber-spaulding

Efforts to Reject Muslims From the Human Family Prove Ridiculous

Sabra Webber
Ohio State U

With Frank Spaulding
Bridgewater State C

Richard Antoun has written that any scholarly approach that concentrates . . . on one type of kinship tie . . . and the “problems” derived from it constitutes a “museum” approach, which creates artifacts of kinship exotica. . . . I concur. . . . Kinship studies have often been considered to be an arcane anthropological preserve, except when more general writers choose to make sweeping generalizations concerning the importance of family ties in the Middle East.

—Dale Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach

As I mentioned in my May AN response to Stanley Kurtz’ discussion of cousin marriage in the National Review, before getting too busy unpacking Kurtz’ thesis of a relationship between parallel cousin marriage and terrorism, one needs to look a bit more closely at who actually marries whom within extended families over generations.

Although Middle Easterners, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, do marry cousins as do Westerners of course (and, in some Jewish and South India Hindu traditions uncles marry nieces, another “blood alliance” common enough to interest kinship experts and the medical profession), we cannot concentrate on parallel cousin marriage as a defining feature of Arabs of various religions, of non-Arab Middle Easterners be they Afghani, Iranian, Turkish, Indian or Pakistini Muslims, or of Arab Americans without studying it in the context of other marriages, over generations, that are made outside the family, as well as with members of other religions, ethnicities, races and nationalities. Cousin marriage in this context is very respectable and an option that ensures, in communities where marriage and family are very important, that there will be someone for most everyone.

The Importance of Context
Some statistical studies of cousin marriage (including those of Frank Spaulding) indicate that the incidence of cousin marriage is higher among impoverished urban communities than in rural settings. The loss of the functional value that extended marriage circles provide in an agrarian or pastoral context combines with the rigors of the urban life to allow for greater adherence to these perceived norms. Gujars, whether from the city or the country, are as willing as any other community might be to promote or accept inter-group (inter-biraderi) marriages if they serve the community’s interests. And, while they are discouraged, “love marriages” do take place fairly regularly even among this group. Children are not disowned for marrying, as long as it is among Muslims, Gujari or not. Of course, Muslim men may marry non-Muslim women in any case according to even the strictest of Muslim laws.

A quick look at studies that specifically sought out locations where contemporary marriages among close blood relatives—Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Hindu—are highly visible, shows that incidences of marriages between blood relations of any sort never seem statistically to reach above 50%, or half of the siblings in a family, and more commonly the rates are around one sibling out of four or five as anthropologist Ted Swedenburg recently reported.

The highest rates of cousin marriage are not necessarily among Muslims. In South India, marriages between close blood relatives are more prevalent among Hindus than among Christians or Muslims. In comparison to urban areas, among non-Hindus, non-scheduled castes and non-scheduled tribes, as well as educated women, “this practice of marrying relatives is high in rural areas, among Hindus, scheduled castes and tribes, and illiterate women,” noted Sureender, Prabakaran and Khan in a 1998 Social Biology article.

Turning to the US
In his second National Review article on cousin marriage and terrorism, Kurtz rapidly shifts to a consideration of the effects of parallel cousin marriage (now taking for granted, one supposes, that he has convinced us in his first article that Muslim parallel cousin marriage is a dangerous, “Muslimesque” practice) in Western immigrant communities.

It would not be surprising if newcomers to the US—especially if they are people of color who settle in traditionally Anglo areas or are from war-torn regions—might try to maintain a certain comfort level by bringing over family or village members via the marriage route in the first generation or two. Like many Katrina victims who suddenly found themselves in culture shock after having suddenly to move completely outside their comfort zone in the most disastrous of economic and social circumstances, Muslim refugees like those from rural Somalia, Sudan or Yemen flung suddenly Westward as a result of war and other political upheavals, disease and famine must similarly experience fear and panic, a desire for “normalcy” and security, which might lead these refugees to desire solidification of family and community through close marriages.

Yet, once again, parallel cousin marriage—even among the most vulnerable of these families—is not prevalent enough “to wall off groups from one another and to encourage conflict between and among them,” as Kurtz assumes is its nefarious purpose. Furthermore, when parallel marriage does occur, it is counterbalanced by marriages far outside the family, especially among the Arab and Muslim Americans that have been American citizens for generations.

As a professor at Ohio State University, I have been teaching courses on Arab and Arab-American culture for over 20 years. Thus, I have taught many Middle Eastern students or students of Middle Eastern heritage—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Zoroastrian—who were interested in learning more about their heritage. I cannot, even among first generation American students in fact, remember one student who married a cousin, although the practice may be more prevalent among students who do not attend college.

In the process of teaching “Arab-American Family Immigration Sagas,” an undergraduate course in which students produce a videotaped interview with an American whose family heritage is linked to one of the Arab League countries, I have observed that parents and grandparents, especially those who are themselves immigrants, would prefer that their children or grandchildren find a spouse from the same town, city or country of origin, even a regional “kinship”; yet, in reality such marriages are not common.

Actual marriages that do come to mind are a Muslim marriage between a student of Syrian and one of Pakistani heritage, a marriage between a student of Turkish Muslim heritage and a student of Egyptian Coptic heritage, one between a Syrian-American and an American convert to Islam, a same-sex marriage between an Arab-American Muslim and a Mexican American Catholic, marriage between a Palestinian-American Muslim and an African American Christian, a marriage between a Costa Rican Catholic and a Muslim Syrian American, a marriage between a Christian Syrian American and a Jewish American, a marriage between a Lebanese Muslim student immigrant and a fellow student who was an Anglo-American Christian.

No matter the religion, the Muslims most likely to marry close blood relatives appear to be those in similar situations to non-Muslims in the US who marry within the family: those in isolated rural areas (demonstrated in studies like that of Frankenberg’s of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia published in 1992 in Human Biology), those socially isolated (for example, endogamous marriages among Italians in Boston in the early 1900’s recorded by Danubio and Pettener in a 1997 Journal of Biosocial Science article), those with small populations to begin with who “self-isolate” (for example the Amish or in some cases Mormons who still practice polygamy or Mennonites), and any place where the women marry early, are poor and are not educated, thus having little opportunity to make connections outside their community.

Move Beyond Stereotypes
And even in these cases, one must be wary of “incestuous amplification.” In a personal communication from anthropologist Patrick Mullen in response to a draft of this essay, he indicated, “I have run across [Kurtz’] kind of imagining a pure (which is interpreted as impure in his case) ethnic, racial or religious group a lot lately. The reading I have done on race is full of it—blacks portrayed as culturally separate, reinforcing racial boundaries—when all the evidence shows cross-cultural mixing.”

Mullen points out that for decades scholars like Susan Gubar and Albert Murray have referred to American culture in toto as “mulatto,” if not “African American.” Referring to Appalachian stereotyping, Mullen adds that experts on Appalachian culture still tend to describe Appalachians much as Kurtz describes Muslims, “…as isolated, inbred, set in their ways, unchanged since the 18th century, [while] ignoring, in the case of Appalachia, the Eastern Europeans, Native Americans and African Americans who live in Appalachia in large numbers and who have intermarried with the Anglos.” And further ignoring “all the outside influences of traveling within the region and between northern and eastern cities, access to radio, television, newspapers, magazines and the Internet.”
Doubtless, one could find examples of the “forced marriage [and] honor killing” that Kurtz focuses in on as behavior of Muslims in “Europe today.” Attributable to culture shock in many cases, these behaviors are not recently imported or confined to Muslims or to recent immigrants. And, in the US with Jonestown, Columbine and Ruby Ridge to consider, I do hope we don’t think “we” are higher up on some imagined evolutionary ladder.

On the flipside, Kurtz’ arguments about the misfit of Muslims in Europe are uncomfortably reminiscent of political scientist’s Samuel Huntington’s arguments in Who are we? The Challenges to America’s Iwdentity about White nativist backlash against Hispano-American culture because, in one of Huntington’s scenarios, the “mixing of races and hence culture is the road to national degeneration.” Although, in Kurtz’ scenario, the danger is the opposite—inbreeding rather than “mixing of races”—the impetus is the same, both tending to a theory of “others,” that constructs certain races, cultures or religions as threats to “us” due to “our” irreconcilable differences.

Huntington is not a cultural anthropologist and is a naïf (and not in the lustrous sense) when it comes to thinking through the complexities of “civilization,” but Kurtz’ decision to move the members of one of the largest religions in the world outside the human (Western) family is a mighty peculiar one for an anthropologist. In fact, once one interacts closely with multiple members of any one “civilization”—be it Muslim or Chinese or Hispanic—the concept of an unbridgeable civilization clash proves ridiculous, as mid-19th century British anthropologists, at the dawn of the discipline gradually began not just to posit, but to prove.

Efforts by Stanley Kurtz to reject Muslims from the human family, at least the Western human family, and to portray them as fundamentally socially different are eerily similar to 19th century discourses of empire wherein many of the empire builders, including some of the founders of anthropological societies, relegated Africans, as Kurtz does Muslims, with their supposed “self-sealing” tendencies, as Huntington does with, well, almost everyone, forever ”other” to some imagined “us.”

Sabra J Webber is an associate professor at Ohio State University. She is author of the award-winning Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North Africa, and recipient, among others, of NEH, Rockefeller, Fulbright and SSRC research fellowships.