Iraq's Family Bonds Complicate U.S. Efforts

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Iraq's Family Bonds Complicate U.S. Efforts


Sat Sep 27, 2:53 PM ET Add Top Stories - The New York Times to My Yahoo!


By JOHN TIERNEY The New York Times

ALEMIYA, Iraq (news - web sites), Sept. 27 — Iqbal Muhammad does not recall her first glimpse of her future husband, because they were both newborns at the time, but she remembers precisely when she knew he was the one. It was the afternoon her uncle walked over from his house next door and proposed that she marry his son Muhammad.


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"Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages," said Robin Fox of Rutgers University, the author of "Kinship and Marriage," a widely used anthropology textbook. "Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers." Iraqis frequently describe nepotism not as a civic problem but as a moral duty.


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Next to the family, the sons' social priority is the tribe, Sadah, which has several thousand members in the area and is led by Sheik Yousif. He and his children see their neighbors when praying at Sunni mosques, but none of them belong to the kind of civic groups or professional associations that are so common in America, the pillars of civil society that observers since de Tocqueville have been crediting for the promotion of democracy.


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Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions — like the church.



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[DuctapeFatwa]

1. excerpt with update on Uday/Qusay reward money

Saleh dismissed the reports that Americans had given $30 million and safe passage out of Iraq to the informant who turned in Mr. Hussein's sons.

"I assure you that never happened," Saleh said. "The American soldiers brought out a camera and gave him the money in front of a witness, and then they took him toward the Turkish border. Near the border they killed him and buried him in a valley. They wanted the money for their own families."