Claim: 50% of Muslims and 70% of Pakistanis in the UK are inbred, and the majority of disabled children in the UK are born to Muslim parents.
Fact: There is no publicly available data on the proportion of Muslims and Pakistanis that are “inbred” or were a result of a consanguineous marriage. Data on consanguineous marriages in the UK does exist, but it only speaks for the British Pakistani communities in Birmingham and Bradford, not in all of the UK.
With reference to the rates of ”inbreeding”, Soch Fact Check reached out to the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) via email, and we were informed that “the ONS has not undertaken any direct analysis of this [the rates of inbreeding].”
Soch Fact Check also contacted a director-level official from the UK Statistics Authority, the government department overseeing the use of data by all UK government departments, including the Office for National Statistics, who informed us that the post on X “does not cover the use of official statistics or data by a government department or politician.”
On 21 September 2024, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a photo of what appears to be a middle-aged couple and their disabled children. The caption spoke about the practice of inbreeding in Muslim and Pakistani populations in the UK. A screenshot of this post is shown below:
Fact or Fiction?
Are 50% of Muslims and 70% of Pakistanis in the UK inbred?
Publicly available data on consanguineous marriages in the UK is scant. The UK Statistics Authority and Office for National Statistics have not collected or published any such data on the population as a whole.
We came across a volume of academic research conducted on consanguineous marriages in the UK over the years. However, most of these studies are not recent and are representative of the populations of either Bradford or Birmingham only, and not all of the UK.
A 1993 study titled “A Five-Year Prospective Study of the Health of Children in Different Ethnic Groups, with Particular Reference to the Effect of Inbreeding” claims that 60% to 70% of marriages within the Pakistani community in Birmingham are “between relatives.” This figure, in turn, is based on a study from 1990 titled “Race, consanguinity and social features in Birmingham babies: a basis for prospective study.” It stated that the “highest prevalence of parental consanguinity was in Pakistani Muslims (69%),” but this is from a sample of 956 Pakistani mothers from the city of Birmingham specifically. This figure does not represent the rate of consanguineous marriages among Pakistanis in all of the UK. Most importantly, it is from 1990.
Currently, 17% of the total population in Birmingham is Pakistani (seen on the interactive map here) and the total population of Birmingham is 1,144,900 (as seen here). Hence, there are approximately 194,633 Pakistanis in Birmingham. Taking this figure as a percentage of the total population of Pakistanis in the UK (calculated by adding the constituent populations of Pakistanis in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), the population of Pakistanis in Birmingham forms approximately only 11.7% of the total population of Pakistanis in the UK.
Soch Fact Check could not find any recent studies on the rates of consanguinity among the whole of the British Muslim and Pakistani population in the UK, or even just within Birmingham.
A more recent example is an academic article titled “The Case for Banning Cousin Marriage”, published in May 2024, which stated that the rate of consanguineous marriages among the British Pakistani diaspora is rising. A deeper look at the sources used as the basis for this claim, however, revealed that it is misleading. The first source is an article published in 2010 titled “Consanguinity, human evolution, and complex diseases,” which said that “no similar trend [of declining consanguineous marriages] seems to have occurred in the United Kingdom’s Pakistani population.” The second source is the book titled British Islam and English Law by Patrick S. Nash, which stated “Most British Pakistanis marry foreign spouses (71 per cent) and, with regional variances, the proportion of marriages within the extended family ranges from 59 to 87 per cent.”
Both these sources reference an article by Alison Shaw, published in 2002, titled “Kinship, Cultural Preference and Immigration: Consanguineous Marriage Among British Pakistanis.” Shaw observed that 41 of the 70 marriages (59%) were between first cousins, and 61 of the 70 marriages (87%) took place within the biradari or zat. Shaw defines biradari as “relatives who know each other well, can demonstrate their relatedness and live in the same place” and “everyone with whom there is an assumed kinship link, known or not”, while zat is defined as “caste”. However, Shaw’s findings are presented by the 2010 article and book as representative of the whole British Pakistani population in the UK, whereas the research undertaken by Shaw was of a relatively small sample size of 70 marriages, all from the city of Oxford. It does not represent the rates of consanguinity among the whole of the British Muslim and Pakistani population in the UK.
The third source is a YouTube video from 2019 titled “Galton Institute conference 2015” where Dr Alan Bittles, Adjunct Professor and Research Leader at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University, presents on the topic of consanguinity. While Dr Bittles does state that the rate of consanguineous marriages has increased in certain parts of Pakistan, he does not make any claim regarding the rates of consanguineous marriages increasing within the British Pakistani diaspora. Near the end of the video at 49:49, Dr. Bittles, speaking generally of consanguineous marriage as an institution, says that an “overall reduction appears inevitable in consanguineous marriage.” However, at 51:12, he cautions that the “maintenance of cultural traditions, particularly in rural communities, cannot be underestimated.” He states, at 52:13, that there has been an increase in consanguineous marriages in places where there is political and civil instability, like Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) where consanguineous marriages have increased by 15 percent.
Apart from these articles and the video, the most comprehensive study with publicly available data for consanguinity in the UK is the Born in Bradford study—an internationally recognised research programme “which aims to find out what keeps families healthy and happy by tracking the lives of over 40,000 Bradfordians.” The study tracks the “health and wellbeing of over 13,500 children, and their parents born at Bradford Royal Infirmary between March 2007 and December 2010” all the way from pregnancy through childhood and into adult life. According to their latest publication from December 2022, the rates of consanguinity among British Pakistani couples in Bradford (UK- and Pakistani- born) had reduced from 60% to 43%.
Soch Fact Check reached out to Dr. Neil Small, Emeritus Professor of Health Studies at the University of Bradford UK and Academic Lead at the Born in Bradford study who corroborated the figure given in BiB’s latest publication.
Corresponding with Dr. Small via email, we were told that the claims made by the post on X are inaccurate.
Professor Small defined the term “inbred” as meaning parents who are blood relations. Such unions are also referred to as “consanguineous” in academic medical literature. Often, these unions involve marriages between first or second cousins.
Responding to the claim that 50% of Muslims and 70% of Pakistanis in the UK are inbred, Professor Small informed us that there is “no national data on how many such unions there are,” but that local studies from Bradford have found robust figures. Based on a comparison of datasets collected by the Born in Bradford study (one from 2007–2010 and the other from 2016–2019), there was a “substantial decrease in consanguineous unions in women of Pakistani heritage” from 62.4% to 46.3%. Professor Small corroborated this, informing us that 46% of “Pakistani heritage mothers” reported they were in consanguineous unions. He also stated that, though the figure was higher in the past, it never reached 70%.
Here, it is important to note that the previous figure of 62.4% is in reference to consanguineous marriages in the Pakistani population in the city of Bradford, where only 8.3% of the total number of Pakistanis and 4.1% of the total number of Muslims based in the UK reside. The above figure of 8.3% was calculated by taking the number of Pakistanis residing in Bradford (seen here) as a percentage of the total number of Pakistanis in the UK (Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland). The figure of 4.1% was calculated by taking the number of Muslims in Bradford (seen here) as a percentage of the total number of Muslims in the UK (Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland).
Hence, considering that the Born in Bradford study is the only publicly available statistical data on consanguineous marriages in the UK (for the population of Bradford), it is unclear as to where the post on X is quoting its numbers from. If the numbers have been taken from the Born in Bradford study, they do not apply to the entire population of Pakistanis in the UK.
Professor Small also stated that while there is a genetic risk associated with consanguinity, the “numbers are small and risks of genetic anomalies occur in all communities.”
Are the majority of disabled children in the UK born to Muslim parents?
Regarding the claim about the majority of disabled children in the UK being born to Muslim parents, the most relevant study Soch Fact Check found was the “Protected characteristics by disability status, England and Wales” by the Office for National Statistics UK.
This study uses data collected in the 2021 United Kingdom Census conducted in England and Wales, with a high response rate of 97%.
According to Census 2021 data, “the highest proportion of disabled people across most age-bands,” in both England and Wales were from “Other religion”, and did not identify as “Muslim”. This can be seen below:
While the data does not offer statistics for children or teenagers under 16, it is significant that Muslims make up one of the lowest percentages for disability within the “16 to 49” age-band, which is closest to the age group referenced in the claim.
Though the claim stated that the highest number of disabled children in the UK are born to Muslim parents, Soch Fact Check also studied the percentage of disabled children across ethnic groups, which is shown below:
The data above shows that the highest proportion of disabled people in England and Wales, across every age, are white and ethnically belong to the group “Gypsy or Irish Traveller”. Moreover, the subcategory of “Gypsy or Irish Traveller” consistently ranks higher than that of “Pakistani” in terms of the percentage of disabilities. Only among non-white ethnic groups in England, was the highest proportion of disabled children, under the age of 16 years, from Bangladesh and Pakistan comprising “4.7” percent of the population. In Wales also, the highest proportion of disabled children under 16 were Pakistani, but only from the non-white population and not the entire population of Wales.
Similar data on disability for the rest of the UK — Northern Ireland and Scotland — was not found on the websites for the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), National Records of Scotland, or Scotland’s Census. However, based on Census data collected in Scotland (in 2022) and Northern Island (in 2021), there are approximately 119,605 Muslims in Scotland (Muslims constitute 2.2% of the total population in Scotland, which is approximately 5,436,600, as seen here) and 10,870 Muslims in Northern Ireland (as seen in the file titled “MS-B21” on this page of the National Ireland Statistics and Research Agency). Taking the total population of Muslims in the UK to be approximately 4,030,475 (by adding the 3.9 million Muslim population in England and Wales), Scotland and Northern Ireland make up approximately 2.9% and 0.26% of the total population of Muslims in the UK respectively. Based on these low figures, it is unlikely that the Muslim populations in these countries account for the “majority” of disabled children in the UK, as stated in the claim.
With respect to this claim, Dr Neill Small told us that official data disproves this statement. In England and Wales, 6.5% of the population identifies as Muslim, and 11% of children are disabled. Soch Fact Check verified that this figure of 11% is from the Family Resources Survey, which is the only available UK-wide survey that contains statistics on the proportion of disabled children. According to Dr Small, it is not plausible that 6.5 % of the population “could provide the majority of disabled children in the UK.”
Lastly, the picture shared in the claim is misleading as well, because it is not from the UK. A reverse image search reveals that the earliest known instance of the photo is 31 January 2017 when it was shared on Facebook. The picture features a header with the caption: “If you think that your life is such a mess, just breathe and compare yourself to them. They are #Syrian older citizens who became refugees and took shelter in #Turkey together with four disable[sic] sons. Seriously[sic] i want to cry…” The caption of the post itself is very lengthy and in Amharic. According to Google translate, part of the caption also translates to, “These parents are living in asylum in Turkey, away from their broken Syrian life with four unhealthy children.” Hence, the context of the picture is very different from that of the claim.
Based on these findings from official statistics and our correspondence with academics and health officials in the UK, Soch Fact Check rates the claim on X as false.
Virality
The post on X has gathered 14 million views and 16 K reposts.
On X, the claim was also found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
On Facebook, the claim was found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: The claims made in the post on X regarding Pakistani and Muslim inbreeding and disability in the UK have no factual basis. Hence, they are false.
Moreover, the data on consanguineous marriages and disability in the UK that is publicly available does not mention the exact statistics in the claim. The existing data is also in the context of either specific cities (like the Born in Bradford study) or constituent countries of the UK (like the Census data on disability in England and Wales), and it does not speak to the whole population of the UK. Hence, it is unclear as to where the figures in the claim are being quoted from.
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Background image in cover photo: Center for Strategic and Contemporary Research
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