marrying your cousin could lead to terrorism

One of the most thought provoking articles I've come across this week is this one by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online: Marriage and the Terror War: Better learn up on your anthropology if you want to understand the war.

Here is an excerpt:

The distinguished historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington have together popularized the notion that Muslims are scapegoating the West because of an underlying incompatibility between Islamic society and modernity. Lewis roots this incompatibility in the Muslim seclusion of women and also in the failure of Islam to separate church and state. Yet, in “Root Causes,” I show that the Muslim seclusion of women, and even characteristically Muslim church-state relations, are part and parcel of a distinctive kinship structure built around a preference for the marriage of cousins.

Well that explains a lot, doesn't it?

<>< TM