"I just feel sorry for the ugly ones."

Thank you, Jewely, it's about time we got some sympathy.

Somebody please correct me if my maths are out, but as I understand cousin-cousin marriages, they have the same grandparents. But so did they, and so did theirs. So their gene pool is limited to four ancestral contributors: does that sound right ?

But, when an unrelated couple marries, they have different grandparents, gt-gt-grandparents, etc., at least for many generations, a multitude of gene pools and a multitude of ancestral genetic contributors. Go back far enough, say three or four hundred years, and of course they start to share ancestors: there are only so many people in an entire region or country.

Is cousin-cousin marriage solely related to limiting inheritance of property to the extended family ? So is it an anti-social expression, of hostility and opposition between (extended) family and society generally ? Marx's colleague Fred Engels wrote a fascinating little book (Origin of the Family ....) dealing partly with the contradiction between group and family which might warrant another reading :)

Joe

Thanks Proxy. Now I understand why some people in this forum have been fighting so hard to protect women's right to wear the burqua - LOL

Sometimes, even the burqa reveals too much:

'"Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ... members have orders to tell any women in public to cover up her face if they find that her eyes are seditious,” ... said ... Sheikh Mutlaq Al Nabit, a Commission spokesman in Hael.
Women in Saudi Arabia, one of the most conservative Muslim nations, must veil their faces in public but some of them uncover their eyes.'

http://www.emirates247.com/news/region/women-with-seditious-eyes-must-cover-up-2010-11-14-1.317325

How much Islamic freedom can burqa-lovers bear?

Thank you, Proxy: it must be difficult for such reactionary societies - they need women, but they don't want women. Without women, there won't be another generation of men, but what to do with them while they are needed ?

Keep your woman either indoors or covered up, either way out of sight of those other b@stards who would impregnate her as soon as look at her, so find ways so that she can't be looked at, and keep her supervised. That way, you can be sure of the paternity of her children. But once she's done her job .....

What a ghastly culture for women. So the only way they can get out of the house is by agreeing to wear the nikab, or burqa ? Then let's not impose more burdens on them by somehow blaming them for their own oppression.

I heard recently of a Muslim student who remarked to an Australian friend, 'you're lucky, you have no culture.'

Yes, sometimes I suspect that 'culture' is not much more than elaborate ways to justify dominant social relations, i.e. who has the power in a society and who is subordinate and does most of the work, apart from raising the group's children and thereby perpetuating it.

Joe