Cousin Marriages and its effects, what Pakistan can do to prevent it moving forward/

 

Consanginous marriages pose a significant threat to Pakistan, particularly women, and are considered unhealthy by scientific research, which makes it wrong in Islamic lenses as Islam prohibits anything unhealthily.

Cousin marriages are extremely common in Pakistan, more than anyone in its region. The effect these marriages have can be genetical as well as making the atmosphere of the country less capable of being progressive as it restricts free choice of spouses.

 

How it affects the society of Pakistan and why it is bad

In Pakistan, these cousin marriages are not about love but rather them having to get married for the sake of it. A girls parent most of the time forces her daughter to get married to their cousins. This mentality is very disastrous for society as a whole and women freedom.

It is promoted and seen as acceptable by uneducated religious zealots who don't know any better because it is not prohibited in Islam, fast food in unhealthy and not prohibited in Islam either, does that mean we should eat fast food all the time.

Now, one-off cousin marriages may be fine in the situation. However, the situation is that most of these marriages are going on for generations.

It’s been proven, though, that marriage among first cousins has an 8% chance of a birth defect and that risk only gets higher if those offspring continue to marry their first cousins, which is the case in Pakistan.

There are a lot of medical problems that come with cousin marriages.

 * **Recessive Genes**: Everyone carries some harmful genes, but they usually don’t cause problems because we have two copies of each gene, one from each parent. If both parents carry the same harmful gene, their child has a higher chance of inheriting two copies of that gene, leading to genetic disorders.

 * **Common in Cousins**: Cousins share more genes than unrelated people, so their children are more likely to inherit the same harmful genes from both parents.

 * **Higher Chance of Birth Defects**:
* Children of closely related parents have a higher risk of being born with physical or developmental problems.

  * **Reduced Genetic Diversity**:
* Less variety in genes can make it harder for future generations to adapt to new diseases or environmental changes. Genetic diversity is like having a varied toolkit; the more tools (genes) you have, the better you can handle different problems.

 * **Health Problems**:
* There can be a higher incidence of illnesses like heart conditions, hearing loss, and certain metabolic disorders.

Scientists say inbreeding is causing an unusually high number of genetic mutations to spread in Pakistan, leading to disabilities in children of consanguineous marriages.

 More info:

https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-cousin-marriages-create-high-risk-of-genetic-disorders/a-60687452

https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1851

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289608001608

https://www.nature.com/articles/266440a0

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29760212

 

 

No country "India" before 1947

 

Sir Charles Wilkins: The founder of "Hinduism."

 

Refutation of anti-Chinese propaganda regarding Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang by the Western and Indian medias

Is Pakistan the biggest "begger state" as commonly propagated?

 The purpose of this post is not to insult other countries, but rather question the commonly propagated claims against Pakistan.

IMF bailouts do not mean that Pakistan always needs them. Efforts are being made to improve economic stability, attract investment, and implement long-term structural reforms to reduce the need for repeated bailouts.

 However, other countries have received more foreign aid than Pakistan for multiple decades: (open link in new tab by right clicking and click to enlrage):

 

We the people of Pakistan, irrespective of religion, are the true Indians

Pakistan was created to allow Muslims to live as free citizens without the fear of being dominated by a resurgent, occasionally hostile, Hindu majority. However, not feeling secure even in independence, Pakistani people have driven themselves to a social and historical narrative that strives to align our genetic origins with our religious roots in the East.

In pursuit of this goal, we have also shed our heritage; the very values and customs that defined a nation. 

Some of these trends to de-link from the indigenous Indian society started a millennium ago in an atmosphere of insecurity due to frequent armed incursions from the Western passes. 

After independence, the Pakistani nation should have felt secure enough to display affinity with this land but then the religious zealots took us on a confounded and misleading trajectory.

At the outset, let it be clear that there is no illusion about religion being an important factor in the lives of people all over the world. 

Even in this age of relative atheism, “living together” and secularism in the liberal Western countries, where people have been estranged from religion, the church continues to hold a visibly important place in society.

 Irrespective of the level of affinity with religion, births, deaths and marriages are often solemnized as religious events in the church by a priest. 

Even under the communist regimes, where religion was officially abolished and legally suppressed for a hundred years, people continue to find solace in divine convictions.

We in Pakistan have employed religion as a pivot to distance ourselves from our own land, culture, history and heritage. 

There has been little realization that in attempting to be what we are not and in rejecting what we are, we will be lost as a people. Being neither here nor there implies that we are nowhere. 

We have an apt proverb in Lashkari for this situation that describes a creature as one half partridge and the other half a quail. That is our true description too.

In trying to move away from being Indians, we have induced ourselves to be Arabesque or Persianate. 

Now, of course, the Arabs, Persians and especially Turks are our closest social and religious kith and kin, our natural allies and we feel a natural affinity for them. 

A large section of our people carries their genes, as well as habits of dress, food, culture and surnames. 

However, we belong to the South Asian Subcontinent. We are neither Arabs, nor Turks, nor Persians. Even if we try to be one of them, we shall become unacceptable intruders and imposters. 

Try telling an Arab that in being a Syed, one is an Arab; or telling a Turk that one’s surname of Bokhari entitles one to be a Turk; or a Persian that being a Shirazi by name, one is Persian.

Instead of acceptance, such a claim can only raise a mocking smirk!

 One staggering loss in this identity crisis has been a name that has been appropriated by our Eastern neighbor. 

We are children of the Indus. 

Most of the country and its nearly entire grain producing farmlands are drained by this river and its numerous large and small tributaries.

 There are three major geographical divisions of the Subcontinent.

 One of them is the Vindhya Hill ranges that separate North and South India. 

The second is the gentle hump separating the east-flowing Ganges and its tributaries and the West-flowing Indus and its tributaries – this distinguishes the modern nations of Pakistan and Bharat.

The Persians called the land Hindush, a Sanskrit equivalent of Sindhu, which was the historical local reference to the Indus River. 

Even the ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as “The people of the Indus”. 

We, the people of Pakistan were therefore in error in simply relinquishing the name ‘India’ to our eastern neighbor. It is our name.

The great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata tells us that Bharat, meaning the ‘Cherished’, was a descendant of the Lunar dynasty and was the ancestor of Kauravas and Pandavas, two antagonists of that epic battle. 

We are also told that he sacrificed horses on the banks of the Yamuna, the Saraswati and the Ganges, but none for the Indus. 

Bharat, therefore, is the proper religious, cultural and natural name of a country that reveres the Mahabharata and the Ganges.

That the people beyond the Indus were called Indoos or Hindus, who happened to be of a different religion, is a geographical allusion and not a religious one. 

Nevertheless, we the people of Pakistan, irrespective of their religion, are the true Indians; the inhabitants of the land of the Indus. 

Of course this cultural loss has now gained permanence as Bharat and India are the official names of our eastern neighbor but we need to be mindful of our cultural loss in losing our rightful alternate name.

The second loss is that of historical narrative. This is a great loss and has multiple dimensions. 

The Subcontinent was ruled by Sultans of Turkic and Persian origin for seven hundred years, from the Ghaznavid raids in or about 1000 AD to Nader Shah’s invasion in 1739 AD. 

These ruling families, their fellow migrant noble compatriots and their chroniclers legitimately traced their history to their own lands of origin. 

Unfortunately, this trend, fueled by the religious class, crept in the psyche of most of the Subcontinent’s Muslims. 

My paternal grandfather’s great grandfather converted to Islam. He was a migrant from Kashmir to Amritsar. My family had lived in the valley for centuries since the Aryan irruption from Central Asia. 

How do I shun or escape this history and at what point do I cut short my past and dishonestly develop factitious links to some prominent town or personality of the erstwhile Abbasid province of Khorasan? 

This is not to say that those who do so, believing that to be their factual lineage, are wrong but the question still stands: at what point in time does one start belonging to the land that has nourished one’s forefathers and delete the various prefixes and suffixes that indicate them to be progeny of intruders and raiders of this land?

When renouncing the history of our part of the land, we have become alienated from some of the sons of this soil who should have done us proud.

The first of these is the dignified Raja Porus who was born in the Punjab and his kingdom extended over the Chaj Doab – the land falling between the rivers Jhelum and Chenab. 

His blood descendants are more likely to be living amongst us rather than across the border. We should claim him as one of our heroes.

There is hardly any reason for repudiating his legacy from our national narratives especially when the famous battle of the Hydaspes, between the ancient Punjabi armies of Porus and Greek forces of Alexander the Great was fought in 326BC. 

That happened 900 years before Islam and 300 hundred years before Christianity came into being. 

We live on an ancient land that was a thriving concern much before these religions came into existence. We should be proud of that.

Taxila – Takshashila – of the ancient world- was the centre of a great civilization. One of its greatest luminaries was Chanakya, also known as Kautilya. 

He was a philosopher, a political scientist and an economist. 

His Arthasastra is perahps the first ever treatise on politics, statecraft and economics, predating Machiavelli’s The Prince by 1,800 years. 

He mentored Chandragupta, the architect of the Mauryan Empire and served as his Chief Minister. 

He was in his 40s when Alexander traversed from north to south through the land that constitutes all four provinces of Pakistan. 

He helped in defeating and expelling the Greeks from Punjab to well across the Indus. 

He is perhaps the greatest Indian of the ancient world and he was born and raised in Taxila; on the northern slopes of Islamabad’s Margalla Hills.

For some reason, we in Pakistan today portray Chanakya as a villain and a demon whereas he was a realist and understood the complexities of governing a large empire populated with diverse nationalities.

 He was a great philosopher of political science and laid the foundations of this discipline of scholarship. 

His appearance in the sketches available on the internet casts him as a typical temple priest. 

They are images conceived by a Brahmanical mindset and may or may not bear any similarity to the historical Chanakya. However, that is immaterial.

 He, too, lived much before the advent of Islam or Christianity and Pakistanis should not hold a religious grudge against persons of pre-Islamic times.

We should be proud that our land – in the neighborhood of our capital city – gave birth to this sage.

 We could even establish a department in Taxila university in his name to teach political science and political economy, the subjects that he conceived.

Among so many others, another local achievement of great significance that we have neglected to tell our children is the fact that the oldest mathematical manuscript in the world was found at Bakhshali, a village north-east of Mardan.

The document, carbon dated to AD 224-383, contains the first recorded zero in history. 

The 70 leaves of birch bark contain mathematical rules, problems and their solutions in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, on topics of fractions, square roots, progressions and equations of linear and quadratic type. 

That is a lot of modern calculations. 

No wonder that India is acclaimed as the original home of numerals  and mathematics!

 It flourished in the regions encompassing the Taxila civilization from where it spread eastwards to the rest of the Subcontinent and westwards to the Iranian plateau and beyond.

The cultural and scientific achievements that are the legacy of the Gandhara civilization are primarily our heritage and not necessarily that of the people of the Ganga-Yamuna or trans-Narmada regions who now take the overwhelming amount of credit for these inventions.

It is actually the ancestors of modern-day Pakistanis who have given numerals and mathematics to the world. 

We should feel that pride and claim the honor.

The next part of this series will discuss our lost heritage in terms of festivals, names and religious figures.

Author of the article, Parvez Mahmood, retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and historical issues.

 

The concept of Pakistan in the Vedas

 By Koenraad Elst

 Many northwestern tribes were are at war with Vedic kingdoms from the rest of India, similar to Pakistan's position in today's time.

Note:  Some faulty terminology has been edited but everything else is the same.

 Introduction
The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus river, seem ill-chosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign “5000 years of Pakistan”. The “king-priest” apparently is an officiant of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison d’être for Pakistan’s very existence, he was a leading figure in a false religion belonging to Jahiliyya, the “age of ignorance”. Like the seated yogi surrounded by animals, “Śiva Paśupati”, he must be burning in hell now. As for the “dancing girl”, stark naked and in a defying pose, in today’s Pakistan she would be stoned to death right away.

And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with me, as I will take the reader through a convoluted array of scriptural and historical data, and you will see why this conclusion is anything but far-fetched. Indeed, it is inevitable.

Foreign
The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. Thus, R. Siddhantashastree (1978: History of the Pre-Kali-Yuga India, Delhi: Inter-India Publications, p.11) writes:

“The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as an unholy region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe antagonistic to the civilized Aryans until the time of Sambarana, (...) the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He was the first Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal non-Aryans to a considerable distance.”

The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) by positing an antagonism between “Aryans” and “aboriginals”, contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated by the same author, which has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and then to Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan origins. Then again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this received wisdom while the author has a different scenario in mind: the Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors to subdue the natives of other parts of the Indian subcontinent, notably the Northwest. 

 As Shrikant Talageri (The Rigveda, an Historical Analysis, and The Rigveda and the Avesta, the Final Analysis, Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000 c.q. 2008) has argued, the ancient Vedic suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Brahmanistic veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.

Battle of the Ten Kings
By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the Northwest is already populated by cognate tribes speaking a Eurasian ("Indo-European") dialect: first, the Druhyu tribe, still remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pūru tribe, but largely already emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the Vedic people themselves at the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking related dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into the Vedic horizon as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the region’s negative aura.

Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pūru tribe from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the Ṛg-Veda (7:18-33-83). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of the tribes and kings, we recognize Iranic (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be “without Indra” and “without the Devas”, who were indeed demonized in Mazdeism; and “without fire-sacrifice”, because in Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldn’t pollute it by throwing things into it. It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic history, Mazdeism had its distinctive features.

 This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathuštra, the supposed reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three generations later, another battle confirms the division of power and territory. In that more even battle, Ṛjāśva, descendant of Vṛṣagira (hence the “Vārṣāgira battle”), and Sahadeva, descendent of Sudās, face the Iranic king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court priest Zarathuštra’s own hymns: Kavi Vištāspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100, 1:122) and the Avestā. 

The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varuṇa, god of the night sky with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (ṛta/aša, seen in Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a “lord” or “mighty one”. The Iranic, who often replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom”. After the Iranic peoples had demonized the Devas/Daēvas, the Indo-Aryans started to demonize the Asuras, and Varuṇa gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much as so-called "Hinduism" and Islam do today.

In theological respect, the Iranic religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic, and in popular publications this account still persists. This was not entirely correct (SkjaervØ, Prods Oktor: “Zarathustra: a Revolutionary Monotheist?”, p. 317-350, in Pongratz-Leisten, Beate: Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake IN 2011), it remained a polytheism, and Zarathuštra with his hyperfocus on one god was strictly speaking a “henotheist”, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding monotheism, their preferred god Varuṇa was the moralist in the Indo-Iranic pantheon (as is apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathuštra’s henotheism. His religion, and possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn-out conflict described in the Ṛg-Veda.

So, Pakistan, which has a Persianized form of Hindui -Lashkari- as national language, can really be said to be the heir of the proto-Iranic tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Brahmanistic worldview.

Other considerations
The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics, the troublesome characters typically come from the Northwest. The Rāmāyaṇa intrigue is caused by Kaikeyī, a co-wife of Rāma’s father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gāndhārī, mother of the enemy Kauravas, and her brother Śakuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of Draupadī, come from Gandhāra in Afghanistan. Mādrī, who triggers the death of king Paṇḍu, cause of the whole war, belongs to the Iranic Madra tribe (apparently related to the Medes).

The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislike’s relevance to the Aryan Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of the Northwest was so consistent and unadulterated that this could not possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the above and other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own Saraswat Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice was not eaten, but wheat products were. They did not consider wheat, which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest, as real food, and treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri 2008:102-106) The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as Pakistan now is to India.

For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, “barbarian”. The word is generally taken to come from Meluhha, the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in Pakistan. So, long before Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called “barbarians” by orthodox Dravidic religions.

Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas is called the Guṅgu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Guṅgu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon, the crescent. And what country has the crescent in its flag?
 

Territorial claims
The ancient Ānavas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already, such wars typically ended in Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they immigrated from Kashmir, after taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was known in the Mazdean Videvdād as the Airiiānām Vaējo, the “seed of the Iranic peoples”, their intermediary Homeland. It was the place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated westwards from Prayāga as part of Yayāti’s branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947, the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.

This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with Pakistan. So, if all else fails, Pakistan can justify its separate existence, its hostility to India and its territorial demands by invoking Vedic testimony.

A breakthrough slogan
The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu hostility to the Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to the territories now constituting Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies shedding the AIT, so much the better.

Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: “Five thousand years of Pakistan!”