Nearly Half of UK Pakistani Muslims are married to first cousins, this is a shocking investigation into the result of inbreeding

A never-spoken-about problem with Muslims is their inbreeding as a result of their long and deeply-ingrained practice of marrying first cousins — a practice that has been prohibited in the Judeo-Christian tradition since the days of Moses.

More than 7 years ago, the UK’s environment minister Phil Woolas had sounded the alarm about this “very sensitive” issue that is “rarely debated”. Referring to the culture of arranged marriages between cousins in the Muslim immigrant community, Woolas said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

Woolas, whose views are supported by medical experts, said most cases occur in immigrant families from rural Pakistan, where up to half of all marriages involve first cousins. Woolas said: “If you talk to any primary care worker they will tell you that levels of disability among the . . . Pakistani population are higher than the general population. And everybody knows it’s caused by first cousin marriage.”

The problem is made worse by generational inbreeding. As Woolas put it, “Many of the parents themselves and many of the public spokespeople are themselves products of first cousin marriages.” That would explain why research for BBC2’s Newsnight in November 2005 showed that British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4% of all births but 30% of all British children with recessive genetic disorders.