28 March, 2024

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The ‘Islamic Caliphate’ In Sri Lanka

By Muhammed Fazl

Muhammed Fazl

Muhammed Fazl

How [can there be a treaty] while, if they gain dominance over you, they do not observe concerning you any pact of kinship or covenant of protection? They satisfy you with their mouths, but their hearts refuse [compliance]…. – Al-Quran 9:8

Blood was shed, lives were lost, businesses and property destroyed. While the fabric of society is being threatened, spells danger it does when the inclusion of Sri Lankan Muslims itself is seriously being questioned. 

In a multi-religious multi-racial country, where unverified ancient history is only a myth, the question of ‘ownership’ of the country by a particular race need not arise when it serves no purpose or if it is detrimental to the development of the country. Considering the inclination measurements of the average Sri Lankan for change, chances of racist mentalities of the majority community embracing pluralism seems pretty remote as well.

Back to square one where the political demography stands divided on racial/religious lines, one cannot readily find fault with TNA and SLMC for pandering to Tamil and Muslim votes respectively. As much as I am a proponent of the ‘separation of the state and religion’, when communities are victimized solely due to their race or religion, loyalties to the same communities by their representatives cannot be avoided and need to be acknowledged and accepted.

MF1Common it is now to play the ‘communal card’ by selfish politicians in seeking votes, power and wealth, but little do they realize the long term effects in doing so. Sri Lanka has had its fair share of ethnic violence in the last century, and sitting on a volcano waiting to erupt, the last thing this country needs is for one community to antagonize the other. If outfits like Bodhu Balu Sena (BBS), Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) and Ravana Balaya (RB) stirs up nationalist/Buddhist passions all for the sake of supporting the despotic president Rajapaksa, the Muslims, the Tamils and the Catholics/Christians should be able to do the same in electing legislators from their own kind when electing a new government.

Being a Muslim and speaking on behalf of my community, what is NOT acceptable is when politicians with Muslim names, pretending to be looking out for the interests and for the well-being of the Muslims, continue fooling the faithful while working hand-in-glove with the racist Rajapaksa in order to diminish the powers and importance of the peace loving Muslim community of Sri Lanka.

Once again, might is not right, nor should popularity be construed as competence. While modern day elections have nothing to do with the Islamic system of governance, it does lead to confusion, personal ambition, favoritism, greed and disorder among others. If the need for legislators to represent the Muslims becomes crucial, candidates should be competent, qualified and most importantly they should have integrity.

Unfortunately, with the present lot, either the above traits are absent at the time of their candidature or lost once elected. Furthermore, the current Muslim legislators have failed to protect the Muslims, their property and their places of worship from closing or being destroyed by marauding Sinhalese mobs. They have failed to establish a modest dress code nationwide for the schooling weaker sex or to provide a higher level of education for the deserving and the downtrodden. They have failed to protect the community from unfair government taxes, enacted with the sole intention of specifically targeting businesses owned by the Muslims. The list is endless… yet the so-called ‘Muslim parliamentarians’ have the audacity to seek a further mandate or to stake a claim for the ‘right to represent’ the community.

With a history of being second-class citizens in their country of birth, I believe it is time for the Muslims of Sri Lanka to reclaim the lost glory and to take the fight to the enemy territory. The current ‘circus’ has to stop and stop now.

Call me a ‘modern day Saladin’ or an Iconoclast, but there should be NO COMPROMISE in barring the ‘old-guard’ from making a comeback. The ‘old guard’ in this case is in reference to the likes of Mr. Abdul Cader of Kandy, Mr. Fowzi, Mr. Alavi Moulana and the rabid canine A.H. M Azwer. Not knowing where the likes of Mr. Muzammil of NFF or Mr. Nawzer Fowzi Jr. belong, I could only sympathize with their plight should a new government is formed. For the sake of redeeming their lost integrity, I believe one final opportunity should be extended to the self-serving Mr. Faiszer Musthapha, Mr. Rishard Bathiudeen and to the rest of the crossed-over-to-government SLMC parliamentarians. Failure to be ‘righteous’ even at this decisive juncture, I believe they maybe ‘banished’ from the Muslims society in to oblivion and branded as traitors to the community for the rest of their lives.

The ‘enemy status’ of the Mahinda Rajapakse government in the eyes of the Muslim community has now been well established and no sweet words of the actor president will reverse their convictions, not now not ever. The ‘rattle snake’ that he is, Mr. Rajapaksa cannot rattle no more the steadfastness of the country’s Muslims. They may even appear as BBS, JHU or as RB, but look will the enemy for places to hide when/if the Muslim kind decides to ‘raise its head’. Also the cowardice of the likes of Gnanasaras was exposed by their absence when LTTE was running amok and I have no reason to believe they would act any different when facing the wrath of the Muslims.

Come elections or no, miscalculating the silence of the Muslims as a weakness could be indeed costly for Gotabaya Rajapaksa-led outfits such as BBS and for the present ruling class itself. The struggle for justice and equality should be only against corrupt, divisive and abusive politicians and their henchmen. Where they stand, the present enemies of the Muslims seems to be none other than the same politicians whom they elected from their own community and who happens to be well bribed by the devious Mahinda Rajapaksa, and NOT the peace loving Buddhist/Sinhalese majority. While history has taught us that a traitor is a bigger threat than the enemy itself, ‘mob justice’ may just be in vogue when dealing with corrupt politicians, especially when ‘fresh thinking’ is infused to the camps of the opposition forces.

On a conciliatory note, when Muslims and their legislators are found to be complicit in the continuous persecution of the same minority community they belong to, I sincerely hope the methods adopted in the event of a ‘mob justice’ would be humane enough for the guilty to endure. Should the existing ‘Muslim’ parliamentarians, thanks to their disunity, fail to see the signs of impending dangers ahead, my fear of an ‘Islamic Khilafa’ (Islamic Caliphate) styled movement rising its head within our shores may not be unfound after all.

*The writer is an independent social/political activist and can be contacted on muhammedfazl@msn.com and through FB (Fazl Muhammed Nizar).

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    Muhammed Fazl –

    RE: The ‘Islamic Caliphate’ In Sri Lanka

    First Things First.

    1. Make sure All Muslim voters vote.

    2. Educate the Muslims on the Bad effects of Inbreeding, lack of education.

    Judeo -Christians prohibit Cousin Marriages,

    Muslims and Buddhists allow that.should give up that habit.

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      Muhammed Fazl –

      “2. Educate the Muslims on the Bad effects of Inbreeding, lack of education.”

      Spread the word on the bad effects of inbreeding.

      Noah’s Ark

      “I was watching Moonraker a few days ago, when Roger Moore said the lines, “…and the animals went in 2 by 2″. This got me thinking about the bible story of Noah’s ark. If in fact the Ark existed, and 2 of every kind of animal was in fact loaded on board, how long would it take before these animals died out? These animals would rely on reproducing through incestuous relationships, with all the dangers of vulnerability to diseases and the heightened probability of genetic deformations that entails. Does anybody think that a species could actually prevail starting from such a small breeding population?”

      http://sciencefocus.com/forum/noah-s-ark-t2962.html

      How many people would be required to repopulate the Earth without inbreeding?

      http://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/29olnd/how_many_people_would_be_required_to_repopulate/

      [–]Dalroc 9 points 4 months ago*

      You share 100% of your genes with yourself.

      You share 50% with your parents, and therefore your siblings as well.

      So how much do you share with your first cousin?
      Well, let’s start by looking at your aunt/uncle.

      They share 50% of their genes with your parent, and you share 50% with your parent. 50% * 50% = 25%

      Now, your first cousin will share 50% with his/her parent. 50% * 25% = 12.5%
      So everything with 12.75% or less of your genes will be cool.
      How many generations do we need, to make sure there will always be a supply of sub-12.75% relatives, that can be connected and propagated without future clashes?
      Theoretically, it’s not much..

      A first cousin is 3 “steps” in a family tree, where which each “step” a multiplier of .5 is factored in. A step is only allowed between parents/children and siblings.

      You -[1]-> Parent -[2]-> Aunt/Uncle -[3]-> First cousin

      We simply have to trace backwards in the family tree three steps.
      You -[1]-> Parent -[2]-> Grandparent -[3]-> Great stuff
      Now every single offspring from your great-uncle/-aunt will be 4 or more steps away, and there for have less than 12.75% of your genes.
      How many people does this equate?
      Well, you have two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents.
      So assuming everyone keeps having at least 2 babies each, of each gender, we can repopulate the Earth with only 8 people at a 12.75% gene equalization point.
      This can be generalized.
      The shared genes decrease with the formula:
      100/2^n
      Where n is the amount of steps taken in the family tree
      And the amount of people needed scales with 2n .
      From this we can conclude, that theoretically, you need…
      dispersity of genes for steps or population:
      Q = 100/2^n = 100/P
      steps for genes shared:
      Q = 100/2^n => Q*2^n = 100 => 2^n = 100/Q => log(2^n) = log(100/Q) => n*log(2) = log(100) – log(Q)
      =>
      n = [log(100)-log(Q)] / log(2)
      people for genes shared:
      P = 100/Q
      So if there was a mass extinction, and only 1000 people live. What is the most efficient dispersity we can have when it starts equaling out?
      Q = 100/P = 100/1000 = 1/10 = 0.1
      0.1% genes shared within the population, and this would be achieved after
      n = [log(100)-log(Q)] / log(2) => n = [log(100)-log(0.1)] / log(2) = 9.97
      10 generations, or about 280 years. This is ofcourse assuming perfect mixing of the couples.
      Considering there’s 3.2 billion base pairs in our DNA, how many people do we need to get only one single pair shared on average between people, and how long would it take to equal out?
      Well, we know how to calculate percent. So let’s convert.
      100% = 3.2 billion => 1% = 32 million => 0.1% = 3.2 million => 0.0001% = 3.2 thousand => 0.0000001% = 3.2 => 0.00000003125% = 1

      P = 100/Q => P = 100/0.00000003125 = 3.2 billion
      Well… Look at that! Not so surprising if you know maths!
      So how long would it take?
      n = [log(100)-log(0.00000003125)] / log(2) = 31.57
      32 generations, or 900 years.
      TL;DR: We might all have the same heritage, but the genes are so diluted, that calling us all closely related is like homepathy.

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    Muhammed Fazl –

    The ‘Islamic Caliphate’ In Sri Lanka

    Will they Ban Inbreeding?

    FROM THE AUGUST 2003 ISSUE
    Go Ahead, Kiss Your Cousin
    Heck, marry her if you want to

    By Richard Conniff|Friday, August 01, 2003

    http://discovermagazine.com/2003/aug/featkiss

    Can you marry a cousin?
    Laws governing the marriage of first cousins vary widely. In 24 states (pink), such marriages are illegal. In 19 states (green), first cousins are permitted to wed. Seven states (peach) allow first-cousin marriage but with conditions. Maine, for instance, requires genetic counseling; some states say yes only if one partner is sterile. North Carolina prohibits marriage only for double first cousins. Got that?

    In Paris in 1876 a 31-year-old banker named Albert took an 18-year-old named Bettina as his wife. Both were Rothschilds, and they were cousins. According to conventional notions about inbreeding, their marriage ought to have been a prescription for infertility and enfeeblement.
    In fact, Albert and Bettina went on to produce seven children, and six of them lived to be adults. Moreover, for generations the Rothschildfamily had been inbreeding almost as intensively as European royalty, without apparent ill effect. Despite his own limited gene pool, Albert, for instance, was an outdoorsman and the seventh person ever to climb the Matterhorn. The American du Ponts practiced the same strategy of cousin marriage for a century. Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein.
    In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats, not Rothschilds and Darwins. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery—or worse. “You can’t marry your first cousin,” a character declares in the 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs. “You get babies with nine heads.”
    So when a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, a genetic counselor at the University of Washington and the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, announced that cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage, it made the front page of The New York Times. The study, published in the Journal of Genetic Counseling last year, determined that children of first cousins face about a 2 to 3 percent higher risk of birth defects than the population at large. To put it another way, first-cousin marriages entail roughly the same increased risk of abnormality that a woman undertakes when she gives birth at 41 rather than at 30. Banning cousin marriages makes about as much sense, critics argue, as trying to ban childbearing by older women.
    But the nature of cousin marriage is far more surprising than recent publicity has suggested. A closer look reveals that moderate inbreeding has always been the rule, not the exception, for humans. Inbreeding is also commonplace in the natural world, and contrary to our expectations, some biologists argue that this can be a very good thing. It depends in part on the degree of inbreeding.

    Can you marry a cousin?
    Laws governing the marriage of first cousins vary widely. In 24 states (pink), such marriages are illegal. In 19 states (green), first cousins are permitted to wed. Seven states (peach) allow first-cousin marriage but with conditions. Maine, for instance, requires genetic counseling; some states say yes only if one partner is sterile. North Carolina prohibits marriage only for double first cousins. Got that?
    Map by Matt Zang
    Source: cousincouples.com and Cuddle International.

    The idea that inbreeding might sometimes be beneficial is clearly contrarian. So it’s important to acknowledge first that inbreeding can sometimes also go horribly wrong—and in ways that, at first glance, make our stereotypes about cousin marriage seem completely correct.
    In the Yorkshire city of Bradford, in England, for instance, a majority of the large Pakistani community can trace their origins to the village of Mirpur in Kashmir, which was inundated by a new dam in the 1960s. Cousin marriages have been customary in Kashmir for generations, and more than 85 percent of Bradford’s Pakistanis marry their cousins. Local doctors are seeing sharp spikes in the number of children with serious genetic disabilities, and each case is its own poignant tragedy. One couple was recently raising two apparently healthy children. Then, when they were 5 and 7, both were diagnosed with neural degenerative disease in the same week. The children are now slowly dying. Neural degenerative diseases are eight times more common in Bradford than in the rest of the United Kingdom.
    The great hazard of inbreeding is that it can result in the unmasking of deleterious recessives, to use the clinical language of geneticists. Each of us carries an unknown number of genes—an individual typically has between five and seven—capable of killing our children or grandchildren. These so-called lethal recessives are associated with diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia.
    Most lethal genes never get expressed unless we inherit the recessive form of the gene from both our mother and father. But when both parents come from the same gene pool, their children are more likely to inherit two recessives.
    So how do scientists reconcile the experience in Bradford with the relatively moderate level of risk reported in the Journal of Genetic Counseling? How did Rothschilds or Darwins manage to marry their cousins with apparent impunity? Above all, how could any such marriages ever possibly be beneficial?
    The traditional view of human inbreeding was that we did it, in essence, because we could not get the car on Saturday night. Until the past century, families tended to remain in the same area for generations, and men typically went courting no more than about five miles from home—the distance they could walk out and back on their day off from work. As a result, according to Robin Fox, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, it’s likely that 80 percent of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer.

    Global Inbreeding
    Researchers who study inbreeding track consanguineous marriages—those between second cousins or closer. In green countries, at least 20 percent and, in some cases, more than 50 percent of marriages fall into this category. Pink countries report 1 to 10 percent consanguinity; peach-colored countries, less than 1 percent. Data is unavailable for white countries.
    Map by Matt Zang
    Map reproduced with the permission of A.H. Bittles.

    Factors other than mere proximity can make inbreeding attractive. Pierre-Samuel du Pont, founder of an American dynasty that believed in inbreeding, hinted at these factors when he told his family: “The marriages that I should prefer for our colony would be between the cousins. In that way we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.” He got his wish, with seven cousin marriages in the family during the 19th century. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the banking family, likewise arranged his affairs so that cousin marriages among his descendants were inevitable. His will barred female descendants from any direct inheritance. Without an inheritance, female Rothschilds had few possible marriage partners of the same religion and suitable economic and social stature—except other Rothschilds. Rothschild brides bound the family together. Four of Mayer’s granddaughters married grandsons, and one married her uncle. These were hardly people whose mate choice was limited by the distance they could walk on their day off.
    Some families have traditionally chosen inbreeding as the best strategy for success because it offers at least three highly practical benefits. First, such marriages make it likelier that a shared set of cultural values will pass down intact to the children.
    Second, cousin marriages make it more likely that spouses will be compatible, particularly in an alien environment. Such marriages may be even more attractive for Pakistanis in Bradford, England, than back home in Kashmir. Intermarriage decreases the divorce rate and enhances the independence of wives, who retain the support of familiar friends and relatives. Among the 19th-century du Ponts, for instance, women had an equal vote with men in family meetings.
    Finally, marrying cousins minimizes the need to break up family wealth from one generation to the next. The rich have frequently chosen inbreeding as a means to keep estates intact and consolidate power.
    Moderate inbreeding may also produce biological benefits. Contrary to lore, cousin marriages may do even better than ordinary marriages by the standard Darwinian measure of success, which is reproduction. A 1960 study of first-cousin marriages in 19th-century England done by C. D. Darlington, a geneticist at Oxford University, found that inbred couples produced twice as many great-grandchildren as did their outbred counterparts.
    Consider, for example, the marriage of Albert and Bettina Rothschild. Their children were descended from a genetic pool of just 24 people (beginning with family founders Mayer Amschel and Gutle Rothschild), and more than three-fifths of them were born Rothschilds. In a family that had not inbred, the same children would have 38 ancestors. Because of inbreeding, they were directly descended no fewer than six times each from Mayer and Gutle Rothschild. If our subconscious Darwinian agenda is to get as much of our genome as possible into future generations, then inbreeding clearly provided a genetic benefit for Mayer and Gutle.
    And for their descendants? How could the remarkably untroubled reproductive experience of intermarried Rothschilds differ so strikingly from that of intermarried families in Bradford?
    The consequences of inbreeding are unpredictable and depend largely on what biologists call the founder effect: If the founding couple pass on a large number of lethal recessives, as appears to have happened in Bradford, these recessives will spread and double up through intermarriage. If, however, Mayer and Gutle Rothschild handed down a comparatively healthy genome, their descendants could safely intermarry for generations—at least until small deleterious effects inevitably began to pile up and produce inbreeding depression, a long-term decline in the well-being of a family or a species.
    A founding couple can also pass on advantageous genes. Among animal populations, generations of inbreeding frequently lead to the development of coadapted gene complexes, suites of genetic traits that tend to be inherited together. These traits may confer special adaptations to a local environment, like resistance to disease.
    The evidence for such benefits in humans is slim, perhaps in part because any genetic advantages conferred by inbreeding may be too small or too gradual to detect. Alan Bittles, a professor of human biology at Edith Cowan University in Australia, points out that there’s a dearth of data on the subject of genetic disadvantages too. Not until some rare disorder crops up in a place like Bradford do doctors even notice intermarriage.
    Something disturbingly eugenic about the idea of better-families-through-inbreeding also causes researchers to look away. Oxford historian Niall Ferguson, author of The House of Rothschild, speculates that that there may have been “a Rothschild ‘gene for financial acumen,’ which intermarriage somehow helped to perpetuate. Perhaps it was that which made the Rothschilds truly exceptional.” But he quickly dismisses this as “unlikely.”
    At the same time, humans are perfectly comfortable with the idea that inbreeding can produce genetic benefits for domesticated animals. When we want a dog with the points to take Best in Show at Madison Square Garden, we often get it by taking individuals displaying the desired traits and “breeding them back” with their close kin.
    Researchers have observed that animals in the wild may also attain genetic benefits from inbreeding. Ten mouse colonies may set up housekeeping in a field but remain separate. The dominant male in each colony typically inbreeds with his kin. His genes rapidly spread through the colony—the founder effect again—and each colony thus becomes a little different from the others, with double recessives proliferating for both good and ill effects. When the weather changes or some deadly virus blows through, one colony may end up better adapted to the new circumstances than the other nine, which die out.
    Inbreeding may help explain why insects can develop resistance almost overnight to pesticides like DDT: The resistance first shows up as a recessive trait in one obscure family line. Inbreeding, with its cascade of double recessives, causes the trait to be expressed in every generation of this family—and under the intense selective pressure of DDT, this family of resistant insects survives and proliferates.

    Click on the image to enlarge (184k)
    The Inbred Rothschild Family
    This picture gallery portrays members of five generations of the legendary Rothschild banking family, beginning with founder Mayer Amschel and his wife, Gutle. In an effort to build the fortune he had created, Mayer wrote a will that made intermarriage lucrative for his offspring. They took his point and frequently inbred: Cousins began marrying cousins, and in one case, a niece wed her uncle. Albert considered marrying only two women, both cousins. He chose Bettina, with whom he had seven children. Subsequent generations began to outbreed more frequently.
    ©XPLANE.com®

    The obvious problem with this contrarian argument is that so many animals seem to go out of their way to avoid inbreeding. Field biologists have often observed that animals reared together from an early age become imprinted on one another and lack mutual sexual interest as adults; they have an innate aversion to homegrown romance.
    But what they are avoiding, according to William Shields, a biologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, is merely incest, the most extreme form of inbreeding, not inbreeding itself. He argues that normal patterns of dispersal actually encourage inbreeding. When young birds leave the nest, for instance, they typically move four or five home ranges away, not 10 or 100; that is, they stay within breeding distance of their cousins. Intense loyalty to a home territory helps keep a population healthy, according to Shields, because it encourages “optimal inbreeding.” This elusive ideal is the point at which a population gets the benefit of adaptations to local habitat—the coadapted gene complexes—without the hazardous unmasking of recessive disorders.
    In some cases, outbreeding can be the real hazard. A study conducted by E. L. Brannon, an ecologist at the University of Idaho, looked at two separate populations of sockeye salmon, one breeding where a river entered a lake, the other where it exited. Salmon fry at the inlet evolved to swim downstream to the lake. The ones at the outlet evolved to swim upstream. When researchers crossed the populations, they ended up with salmon young too confused to know which way to go. In the wild, such a hybrid population might lose half or more of its fry and soon vanish.
    It is, of course, a long way from sockeye salmon and inbred insects to human mating behavior. But Patrick Bateson, a professor of ethology at Cambridge University, argues that outbreeding has at times been hazardous for humans too. For instance, the size and shape of our teeth is a strongly inherited trait. So is jaw size and shape. But the two traits aren’t inherited together. If a woman with small jaws and small teeth marries a man with big jaws and big teeth, their grandchildren may end up with a mouthful of gnashers in a Tinkertoy jaw. Before dentistry was commonplace, Bateson adds, “ill-fitting teeth were probably a serious cause of mortality because it increased the likelihood of abscesses in the mouth.” Marrying a cousin was one way to avoid a potentially lethal mismatch.
    Bateson suggests that while youngsters imprinting on their siblings lose sexual interest in one another they may also gain a search image for a mate—someone who’s not a sibling but like a sibling. Studies have shown that people overwhelmingly choose spouses similar to themselves, a phenomenon called assortative mating. The similarities are social, psychological, and physical, even down to traits like earlobe length. Cousins, Bateson says, perfectly fit this human preference for “slight novelty.”
    So where does this leave us? No scientist is advocating intermarriage, but the evidence indicates that we should at least moderate our automatic disdain for it. One unlucky woman, whom Robin Bennett encountered in the course of her research, recalled the reaction when she became pregnant after living with her first cousin for two years. Her gynecologist professed horror, told her the baby “would be sick all the time,” and advised her to have an abortion. Her boyfriend’s mother, who was also her aunt, “went nuts, saying that our baby would be retarded.” The woman had an abortion, which she now calls “the worst mistake of my life.”
    Science is increasingly able to help such people look at their own choices more objectively. Genetic and metabolic tests can now screen for about 100 recessive disorders. In the past, families in Bradford rarely recognized genetic origins of causes of death or patterns of abnormality. The likelihood of stigma within the community or racism from without also made people reluctant to discuss such problems. But new tests have helped change that. Last year two siblings in Bradford were hoping to intermarry their children despite a family history of thalassemia, a recessive blood disorder that is frequently fatal before the age of 30. After testing determined which of the children carried the thalassemia gene, the families were able to arrange a pair of carrier-to-noncarrier first-cousin marriages.
    Such planning may seem complicated. It may even be the sort of thing that causes Americans, with their entrenched dread of inbreeding, to shudder. But the needs of both culture and medicine were satisfied, and an observer could only conclude that the urge to marry cousins must be more powerful, and more deeply rooted, than we yet understand.

    Web sites devoted to the topic of consanguinity and cousin marriages abound, with approaches ranging from academic to activist: http://www.consang.net, http://www.cousincouples.com, and http://www.cuddleinternational.org.

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    “They have failed to establish a modest dress code nationwide for the schooling weaker sex” WTF!

    The above sentence proves that the man is a retard. Subject closed.

    Colombo Telegraph, your credibility goes down with each word he utters on your watch. Be more responsible. This man is a racist and this post is basically, a threat. A threat which promises violence and bloodshed. Should such things be allowed? Inciting the public is against the law and you could be sued for publishing such primitive, provocative material and disturbing the peace.

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