It is a biting winter’s evening in Cambridge and apparently we are making history. This is the first serious public discussion in the UK of the law on cousin marriage, and the desirability of legislating against it, since the mid-Victorian era. At a time when British universities seem more interested in discussing diversity, equity and inclusion and decolonising the curricula than engaging with the great issues of the day, there is an unmistakable frisson as we gather around a long beechwood table in the brightly lit Weston Room of the interfaith Woolf Institute. A portrait of the no-nonsense Princess Anne, its patron, smiles down upon us.
Charles Darwin, who was married to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, sought to include a question on first cousin marriage in the 1871 census. Parliament rejected the attempt as being of ‘particular sensitivity’ and ‘unacceptably intrusive’. One hundred and fifty years later, it remains an issue of ‘great controversy’, as Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, chancellor of Manchester University and one of the evening’s expert speakers, acknowledges.
We kick off this almost wholly academic meeting with Rebecca Probert, a legal professor and expert in English marriage law at Exeter University. She guides us through a fascinating history, from the Book of Leviticus, which established a template of forbidden familial sexual relations for a man (mother, sister, niece, granddaughter and other relatives, though not daughter or granddaughter) to Henry VIII and his self-serving legal manoeuvres.
Henry’s Marriage Act of 1540 allowed him to marry Catherine Howard, the first cousin of one of his previous wives, Anne Boleyn, a union which otherwise would have been considered incest under canon law. Cousin marriage, historically the norm for much of the world, has been legal since the Reformation (in 1840, exactly 300 years after Henry’s legal gambit, Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert), but has remained a consistent reference point in public discussions, suggesting ‘some disquiet’ about the practice.
I was expecting more of a brouhaha, but there have been no brickbats, no stinging insults or anything untoward
Next up is Afzal on the case for ‘thoughtful legislation’ on cousin marriage in a changing world. He speaks with authority on its incidence in the British Pakistani community, emphasising that every time he brings it up he receives a ‘pile-on’ of public abuse.
According to Patrick Nash, an expert on religious law and director of the Pharos Foundation, which is co-hosting the discussion, consanguinity rates within the British Pakistani community are between 40-60 per cent, rising to more than 90 per cent within many patriarchal networks in Bradford. Published earlier this year, Nash’s academic paper, ‘The Case for Banning Cousin Marriage’, unexpectedly started trending in Scandinavia, the prelude to Norway, Sweden and Denmark all announcing moves to ban the practice.
The focus has since switched to the UK. On 5 November, the Conservative MP Richard Holden tabled a question for the Justice Secretary, asking her to assess the potential merits of outlawing marriage between first cousins. ‘We are aware that all aspects of weddings, including first cousin marriage, are important issues,’ Alex Davies-Jones, a minister in the justice department, responded. The government would consider the issue. Translation: lob it into the long grass.
Afzal treads a thoughtful line through this minefield, an intersection of culture, law and ethics, tradition, morality and public health. The science is clear. The risks of serious recessive genetic disorders, including Tay-Sachs disease, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis and beta thalassaemia, approximately double through cousin marriage, from 2-3 per cent in the child of an unrelated couple to the (still low) 4-6 per cent for the child of one-time first cousins. Multi-generational cousin marriages, however, are only likely to increase these figures.
It is not always clear which way Afzal is leaning. Some have argued the health risks of cousin marriage are no greater than those from a woman having a child in her mid-forties, he notes. Others say that isn’t true. Taboo for some, cousin marriage for others is about ‘keeping the family together, keeping the property in the family’. He describes how the outlook of the British Pakistani community has steadily evolved, from the more conservative ‘village mentality’ of the first generation to a much more global outlook today. The community is already having the conversation about cousin marriages and there is now a recognition that a much bigger pool of potential marriage partners is available. ‘I’m quite positive about this for the first time in my life. Children have access to online dating apps, they don’t have to rely on mum and dad to find a partner.’ He says he can count the number of prosecutions for forced marriage, criminalised in 2014, on one hand. The same is true for female genital mutilation, criminalised in 1985. ‘Having a law doesn’t always make the difference you think it does.’ Ultimately, Afzal concludes, it is better to engage directly with the communities than impose an outright ban.
Opinion on the panel, which includes Samia Bano from SOAS, Stephen Gilmore (Cambridge), Inaya Folarin Iman (Equiano Project), Jean-Francois Mignot (Sorbonne), Michael Muthukrishna (LSE) and Philip Wood (Aga Khan University), is reassuringly divided. This is no kangaroo court. It’s cultural relativism versus universal moral standards and human rights, accusations of prejudice and stereotyping against open discussions of problems within communities, and personal freedom against public health.
The counter arguments to an outright ban are considered in detail, among them the relatively low risk of genetic disorders and diseases, the danger of stigmatising minorities and the fundamental question of personal autonomy. Responding to the charge of cousin marriages creating an excess burden on the NHS, an accusation levelled by Tommy Robinson, the self-styled English ‘patriot’ currently detained at His Majesty’s pleasure, one of the panellists notes that Muslims generally do not drink, which must save the NHS a considerable sum.
The discussion ends perfectly convivially. To be honest, I was expecting more of a brouhaha, but there have been no brickbats, no stinging insults or anything untoward. Just a few academics finding some things ‘highly problematic’ or ‘deeply concerning’ and only one use of the word ‘Islamophobia’.
These days the mere act of having such a controversial discussion in Cambridge feels like an achievement. Earlier in the day, I was reminded that I had arrived at Anxiety-on-the-Fens with a glance at the Cambridge University Press bookshop on Trinity Street. One of the most prominently featured titles was Out of Her Mind: How We Are Failing Women’s Mental Health and What Must Change, hailed as a ‘giant step forward in de-stigmatising women’s mental health issues’. The idea that there is much stigma attached to an issue which is now entirely mainstream, championed by everyone from Prince William and Stephen Fry to George Ezra and Fearne Cotton, together with schools, the NHS, police, all political parties, parliament and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, is surely fanciful.
That the cousin marriage discussion was convened at all owes much to the Pharos Foundation, an independent research institution founded in Oxford last year. Here I declare an interest. Earlier this year, I received a Pharos research grant to visit Mauritania, helping me complete my history of slavery in the Islamic world, to be published next year.
Pharos has already garnered some heavyweight thinkers. Its president is the eminent Cambridge historian David Abulafia, a regular writer in these pages, who taught me at Caius more than 30 years ago. Nigel Biggar, the Oxford theologian and ethicist, is the chairman, Sir Niall Ferguson a founding fellow.
Why the need for Pharos? Writing in The Spectator recently about the parlous state of Cambridge, the classicist David Butterfield, now a senior Pharos fellow, made it abundantly clear: a fall in academic standards; rampant grade inflation; the infantilisation of education; the rise of the administrative class. Nash argues the arts, social sciences and humanities have become bureaucratic, ideological, conformist and obscurantist.
Sadly, Pharos will likely have few rivals
‘Pharos was founded on the premise that western society will never escape the culture wars if we cannot produce serious culture at scale,’ he says. ‘It’s all very well to talk about free speech and enquiry in the abstract, but freedoms and principles mean little if they are not embodied in institutions with the will and risk appetite to act on them. Our ethos, then, can be stated plainly: move fast and build things.’
And pay well, he might have added. A Pharos research fellowship pays around double the going average, which goes a long way to attracting the best and the brightest. Pharos, which will also offer free public lectures, salons and courses, counts an eclectic range of intellectuals among its first fellows. An expert in twentieth-century English poetry rubs shoulders with a historian of asymmetric warfare, an international relations specialist with an art historian and a philosopher working on ‘the epistemic dimensions of responsibility’.
Inspired by American research centres like the Santa Fe Institute and Hoover Institution,
Pharos was named after the famous, sky-grazing lighthouse of Alexandria, built around 280 BC on the Pharos peninsula. A symbol of illumination then and now, its latest incarnation carries no torch for the relentless rise of DEI in public life.
In his ‘Treason of the Intellectuals’ Pharos lecture at Oxford last month, Ferguson spelled it out. ‘It’s very hard to disagree with ideas like equity, diversity and inclusion. You have to understand that those things mean the opposite of the dictionary definition. What they actually mean by diversity is uniformity of outlook. What they mean by equity is lack of due process when you fall foul of the thought police. And what is meant by inclusion is exclusion of people like Sir Noel Malcolm and me.’
Having watched Harvard take ‘the path to hell at high speed’, he added, ‘nothing would upset me more than to see that whole tragedy repeated at the great British universities. ‘And that’s part of the reason that Pharos exists.’
Pharos will likely have many enemies in the coming years. It is a sad sign of the state of British academe more widely that in terms of freedom of expression and free-ranging intellectual enquiry, it may have few rivals.
