Polygamy: lust or love

There is pretended monogamy in the West, but there is really polygamy without responsibility; the mistress is cast off when the man is weary of her, and sinks gradually to the “woman of the street”, for the first lover has no responsibility for her future and she is a hundred times worse off than the sheltered wife and mother in the polygamous home. When we see thousands of miserable women who crowd the streets of Western towns during the night, we must surely feel that it does not lie within western mouth to reproach Islam for polygamy. It is better for woman, happier for woman, more respectable for woman, to live in polygamy, united to one man only with the legitimate child in her arms, and surrounded with respect, than to be seduced, cast out in the street - perhaps with an illegitimate child outside the pale of the law -unsheltered and uncared for, to become the victim of any passerby, night after night, rendered incapable of motherhood despised by all.

Dr Havelock Ellis writes in The Psychology of Sex, 1910:

It must be said that the natural prevalence of monogamy as the normal type of sexual relationship by no means excludes variations, indeed it assumes them.

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The most common variation, and that which must clearly possess a biological foundation, is the tendency to polygamy, which is found at all stages of culture, even in an unrecognised and more or less promiscuous shape.

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We too often forget that our failure to recognise such variations merely means that we accord in such cases an illegitimate permission to perpetrate injustice. In those parts of the world in which polygamy is recognised as a permissible variation a man is legally held to his natural obligations towards all his sexual mates and towards the children he has, by those mates.

In no part of the world is polygamy so prevalent as in Christendom; in no part of the world is it so easy for a man to escape the obligations incurred by polygamy. We imagine that if we refuse to recognise the fact of polygamy, we may refuse to recognise any obligations incurred by polygamy. By enabling man to escape so easily, from the obligations of his polygamous relationship we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them; we place a premium on the immorality we loftily condemn.

Our polygamy has no legal existence. The ostrich, it was once imagined hides his head in the sand and attempts to annihilate the facts by refusing to look at them; but there is only one known animal which adopts this course of action and it is called Man.

It’s utterly hypocritical to treat homosexuality as natural, although it’s not, and maintain it as a legitimate choice of a person in a democratic society, but fail to accept a scientifically and practically proven fact of human nature that is unfavourable to what we want to believe.

Restricting every man to one wife is not practical and according to Dr Naik, if every man maries a woman, there would still be almost 50 million women left without husbands in USA, UK, Germany and Russia alone. Thus, women without men are left with two options, either marry married men or become public property.

Islam, taking into account the needs and desires of human nature, permitted strictly limited polygamy both to protect women’s and men’s honour and to respond to certain conditions at a particular time.

Therefore, before pointing a finger at Muslims and polygamy, Mr Yusuf and his atheist and Christian friends should ponder and look at their own backyard: they should cleanup the mess they have made in the name of civilisation, modernism, equality and democracy.

It should be noted that under the charter of democracy, every member of the public has the right to lobby for what they believe is their legitimate and humane right.