Islamic religious texts do not explicitly encourage consanguineous marriage. “It seems the well-known Iranian proverb ‘the first cousin’s marriage contract has been recorded in heaven’ is merely a cultural and local custom rather than a religious belief,” concludes a study by two Iranian geneticists.15 What the universal practice of cousin marriage in the Muslim world makes clear, though, is the primacy of blood ties over the mere abstraction of Islamic universality. We observe the same power hierarchy in the practice of consanguineous marriage as in the matter of wife-beating: the Koran
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