Wives Rather Than Mistresses (Polygamy necessity of the age)
Chapter Four
FIGURES TALK LOUDER
Allah desires but to manifest His might and mercy every now and then. If a believer has to obey and give in to Allah's teachings and orders, although he does not realize the reason or reasons behind a ruling made by Allah, non‑believers sometimes help bring into the spotlight unawares Allah's teachings, thus causing the divine legislation to unfold its covert wisdom only to an audience of the unbiased non‑believers who ‑ in acknowledgement of the wise divine instructions ‑ kneel down in awe to the great God. An obvious example in case is the permissiveness of polygamy.
As demonstrated by the most up‑to‑date population census conducted in the US, females outnumber males by more than eight million women; in Britain, women are in excess of men by five million females; and in Germany, the ratio of women to men is 3 to1.
In statistics conducted recently by the weekly "Al Maydan" newspaper[1] of Egypt, only one Egyptian girl out of every ten girls at the age of marriage, which has been pushed up from 22 to 32 years, gets access to marriage. In almost all cases, a potential bridegroom is so well over thirty-five years that he is almost forty years of age. This should not be much to our surprise: a new graduate has to wait for a job for ten to twelve years to obtain it, has to scrimp for some more time and then set off ferreting for his so‑called better halaal "Al Maydan" newspaper goes on to say that accordingly forbidden relations have been increasingly rampant, and so has been the phenomenal common‑law marriage against a background of millions of unmarried women. (By common‑law marriage we mean a form of marriage in which the two would‑be spouses do not dare having their marriage ‑ though legitimate still ‑registered with the officials so authorized by the government). The survey ‑conducted for the newspaper by the two female researchers Ghada Muhammad Ibraheem and Dalia Kamal Azzam under the supervision of the National Center of Sociological and Criminal Studies ‑ has exposed young marriage as having been steeply in decline owing to the ever‑rising standard of life and with unemployment and housing falling well short of the required.
Another survey, released in the US, puts the number of illegitimate children at one out of every six infants born (as reported by Al‑Akhbar newspaper of 2/7/1968). Undoubtedly, the number across the US is to the tune of millions and millions of illegitimate children annually.
Both Iraq and Iran have appallingly been undergoing a grave imbalance between men and women in view of the eight‑year‑old heavy war the two nations had been waging against each other. In either of the two countries the ratio of men to women stands at 1:5 or 1:7 in some other regions.
However, the situation is all the more bizarre and menacing in Bosnia‑Herzegovina, which was plunged into a filthy racial war which had crushingly and ceaselessly persisted from 1992 until 1996. The consequence has been a terrifying ratio of 1:27. Yes, only one man to every twenty‑seven women. The social catastrophe that Muslim nation has been undergoing owing to the scarcity of men and massiveness of women is beyond any stretch of imagination. Communism has been clamped down on that country for tens of years. It jettisoned criminal Communism only to be ensnared in the jaws of a more perishing and criminal crusade. What alternative is there for Muslim girls to do if they can not come across Muslim husbands? Should we let them marry Orthodox Serbs or Catholic Croats just because some over stringent women and men do not acknowledge polygamy? Or is it the fact that those over stringent women and men prefer that Muslim girls should take lovers (adulterers behind the scenes) along Western demoralized lines?
In a hot press report on the "explosion of bachelor girls", Tahani Al‑Burtuqali, the correspondent in Kuwait of Cairo‑based "Al‑Ahram" newspaper, recalls what happened a few years ago when Kuwait's society experienced the phenomenal sending by hundreds of unmarried girls of letters to Kuwaiti wives, in which each girl demanded the wife to share the husband with her in a bid to keep abreast of the problem of the rising number of bachelor girls in Kuwait's society as well as in Gulf society in general. Another report carried by "Al‑Ahram Al‑Arabi" magazine, on its first issue, said there were estimated 40 thousand girls. The number is not little if compared to the entire population of Kuwait as a whole ‑ it represents 16% of Kuwait's women who account for a little more than 250 thousand people out of an entire population of Kuwait as a whole of half a million people.
To deprive a woman of emotion is a greater health hazard than to deprive her of sex. The pleasure attained by a woman when having sex, in the absence of emotion, does not excite a woman as much as a gentle word or kind fondling will certainly do, sending her sexually excited to the degree of satisfaction. This remark is underscored by Saed Abdul‑Azeem, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine. He further explains that a woman's emotional deprivation is the shortest way to acting perversely, sexual frigidity and a wider range of physical and psychological illnesses alike.[2]
Dr. Muhammad Helal Rifa'i, a gynecologist, assertively says that the lack, or even delay of marriage makes a woman more exposed to breast tumours, uterus cancer as well as fibroid tumours than the married ones. Having been polled, many woman patients who frequent his clinic overwhelmingly said they prefer getting married to an already‑married man than gloomily remaining a bachelor girl. Some of those women patients said they even preferred being a third or fourth wife than being permanently held captive by spinstership.
If this is the view of science, a woman doctor can, to a greater degree of fidelity, describe what an unmarried woman feels. A woman doctor cites in a message to Ahmad Bahgat, a veteran Egyptian columnist with the Cairo‑based Al‑Ahrarn newspaper, statistics as having exhibited that estimated ten million women and girls live on their own in Egypt. She further quotes the survey as classifying those women and girls as either divorcees, widows without or with children (who later grew up and embarked on their own lives alone), or girls who have not been married before.
She wonders whether anybody can imagine the magnitude of tragedy that those lonely women have to experience. They cannot maintain balanced relations with others, but they are distraught with tension, anxiety and a deep desire to remain isolated away from curious eyes, forked tongues and pre‑determined charges of snatching husbands from friends, one's kith and kin or neighbors.
This all leads to depression, rejection of life and inability to be properly woven into the society's fabric. The doctor is raising the alarm that those unmarried women are more susceptible to psychologi6al as well as physical diseases, suc4 as migraine, hypertension, arthritis, stomach and duodenal ulcers, irritable colon, menstruation disorders, loss of hair and moral perversity, with many of them having ultimately to marry an already‑married man.[3]
Ironically enough, some Western nations where women alarmingly outnumber men have had to approve polygamy as the only alternative to an imminent irreversible social explosion which they can neither deal with nor cope with its deadly fallout. This happens against a background of Muslims only in the name drumming up war against the validity and legitimacy of polygamy.
Dr. Muhammad Youssef Moussa, an Egyptian celebrated university professor and intellectual in the first half of this century, tells a relevant story whose scene was an international youth conference in 1948 in Germany's Munich city. At the invitation of the conference organizers, Dr. Mohamed Youssef Moussa and one of his colleagues attended a seminar at the aforesaid conference. The major theme of the seminar was a post‑World War II problem in Europe of having women outnumbering men by several fold. Having exhaustively dealt with all solutions proposed by Western participants, the seminar turned them all down, branding them as falling largely short of remedying the immensely difficult problem. Thus far, neither Dr. Youssef Moussa nor his colleague had asked for the floor to address the seminar. Addressing the seminar, they called for the only natural alternative,
Namely adopting polygamy. The Islam‑orientated standpoint was first astonishingly and sneeringly greeted. However, having thoroughly, fairly and prudently mulled over the view, researchers attending the conference ended up approving the Islamic solution to the problem, as the one and only solution, and adopting it as a conference recommendation. Only one year later, residents of then West Germany's city Bonn, were widely reported by the press and news agencies as demanding the German constitution to feature an article allowing polygamy. Hence, Allah manifests what is right despite seculars' unwillingness.[4]
With the system of polygamy having been in place for centuries, Muslim communities have managed to survive countless evils and misfortunes. A comparison simply struck between societies in Saudi Arabia, for example, and the US will show moral crimes ‑ such as rape and prostitution ‑ as rarely taking place in the former, as against mistresses far in excess of wives in the latter, with illegitimately‑born children accounting for more than 45% of births in the US annually. In accordance with official US statistics, illegitimate children had not exceeded 88 thousand infants by 1938, climbing to 202 thousand infants by 1957, to 250 thousand by 1958 and then skyrocketing to millions of infants born outside wedlock. However, real figures usually tend to be, by a long chalk, far more than official figures released by governments and whoever knows the other hidden parts of the situation.
In view of all this, France's celebrated man of letters Atienne Denez once wondered, "Is a ban on polygamy morally useful?
He answers himself by saying, "This is highly skeptical, as prostitution, happening once in a blue moon in most Islamic nations, will be going widely rampant, sending immensely destructive fallout everywhere. Women will largely remain bachelor girls, entailing a great deal of corruption, along those nations banning polygamy”.[5]
[1] Tuesday's issue, May 6th 1997.
[2] "Your Private Doctor" magazine of May 1997
[3] Ahmed Bahgat in his daily column called the "Peeping Show", Al‑Ahrarn of May 13th, 1997.
[4] "Fiqh Al Sunna", by Sheikh Sayyid Sabiq, volume 2, the chapter on the family system, edition published by Maktabatul Muslim.
[5] From the book "Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah", translated by the late Grand Sheikh of Al‑Azhar Dr. Abdul‑Haleem Mahmoud.