Polygamy: lust or love

In seventh-century Arabia, when a man could have as many wives as he chose, to prescribe only four was a limitation, not a license to new oppression. Further, the Koran immediately follows the verses giving Muslims the right to take four wives with a qualification, which has been taken very seriously. Unless a man is confident that he can be scrupulously fair to all his wives, he must remain monogamous. Muslim law has built on this: a man must spend absolutely the same amount of time with each of his wives; besides treating each wife equally financially and legally, a man must not have the slightest preference for one but must esteem and love them all equally.

Since Muslims believe that the Koran is the final revelation from God its rulings and commandments should correspond to the needs of the times. Islam has cautiously left open the matter of multiplicity of wives as certain conditions at a particular time may make it inevitable that men may marry more than one wife.

Here are some arguments. The statistics shows that women have outnumbered male population in the world and the trend is increasingly that way. Dr Zakir Naik says:

World female population is more than male population, [for example] in the USA, women outnumber men by 7.8 million. New York alone has one million more females as compared to the number of males, and of the male population of New York one-third are gays i.e. sodomites. The USA as a whole has more than twenty-five million gays. This means that these people do not wish to marry women. Great Britain has four million more females as compared to males. Germany has five million more females ... Russia has nine million more females ... God alone knows how many million more females there are in the whole world as compared to males.

There is an exception: Mr Yusuf’s “ancestral” place, the Indian sub-continent, particularly India, where there are more males than females. Dr Naik says this is due to the high rate of female infanticide in India. “If this evil practice is stopped, then India too will have more females as compared to males.”

Apart from this, scientific research shows that female children have greater immunity than male children and are better able to fight germs and disease.

Just like in the battle of Uhud, it’s quite common that more men are killed in conflicts than women. It’s also proven that women live longer than men. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) analysis for Europe and North America shows that women live ten years longer than men and compared to men there are more women aged 65 or over in the region, hence one can find more widows than widowers. The report says:

The numbers of old people in the ECE region are growing and women constitute 60 per cent of the population aged 65 and over. In many countries there are more than 150 women for every 100 men, in that age group.

In western societies polygamy is fiercely criticised, meanwhile polygamous lifestyles, where there are extramarital sexual relationships with mistresses and girlfriends, are treated as civilised practice.

For the first time in my life I heard this from a group of girls and boys at my journalism school, where they were actively seeking out the opposite sex to have sex with them, despite having long-term sexual partners. I was initially shocked, but later found out that this was, with very small exception, a common practice in western society.

The arguments in defence of polygamy are not restricted to Muslim scholars, there are well-known non-Muslim writers who corroborate the idea.

Annie Besant says in The Life and Teachings of Muhammad, Madras, 1932: