The right of woman in Polygyny

We have given an account of the decline of the custom of polyandry and of the general acceptance of the custom of polygyny. We elucidated various causes that have contributed to bringing about the custom of polygyny. Some of those causes, no doubt, have their root in the dominating and despotic mentality of the male sex, and some have their origin in the difference of the natural dispositions of woman and man in producing children, and in woman’s capability to produce the number of children desired. This may be regarded, in certain circumstances, a justification for man to have more than one wife. Nevertheless, the state of affairs which has always been mainly effective through out history, due to which polygyny is rendered a woman’s right and the performance of a duty by man, is the comparative excess in the number of women fit to be married as compared to men in a similar situation.

For the sake of brevity, we shall abstain from going into the details and recounting the causes which may be considered sufficient justification for man in marrying several wives. We shall confine our discussion to one cause which, if it really exists, would make polygyny the right of the woman.

In establishing this point two premises ought to be made clear. One of them is that according to quite certain and indisputable statistics, the number of women fit to be married exceeds the number of men in the same situation. The other one is that if this state of affairs is a fact, it creates a right in favour of the left-out and the deprived women which can be claimed from men and married women, because of human rights.

Now as regards the first premise, fortunately relatively exact statistics on this subject are available in the world today. All the countries of the world, every few years, count their inhabitants and collect statistics relating to them. In these census reports, which, in advanced countries are prepared with minute precision, not only are the figures for the male and female sexes available, but the comparative number of each sex in different age-groups is noted down. For example, in these reports it is clearly mentioned that the number of the men in the twenty to twenty-four year age-group is this much, and the number of women in the twenty to twenty four year age-group is this much, and in like fashion the comparative numbers of all age-groups are mentioned. The United Nations Organization, in its annual population studies, continuously publishes these statistics, and till now there have probably been sixteen issues. The latest publication to date is for the year 1964, which was issued in 1965.

We should, of course, keep in mind one point from the very start: that, for our purposes, it is not sufficient to know what is the total number of members of the male sex in a particular country and what is the number of females in that country. What serves our purpose and what is necessary to know is the comparative proportion in the number of males and females of marriageable age. Mostly the proportion of the number of men and women of marriageable age is different from the proportion of the total number of men and women. This is for two reasons. One reason is that the time of puberty for girls is earlier than it is for the boys. It is for this reason that generally all over the world the legal marriageable age for the girls is lower than it is for boys, and almost invariably marriages between men and women all over the world take place while the man is, on the average, five years older than the woman.

The other cause which is more fundamental and more important is that inspite of the fact that births of girls are no more in number than births of boys, and occasionally in some countries births of boys exceed births of girls, deaths in the male sex occur sooner than deaths among females, and so, on reaching marriageable age, that harmony is disturbed and upset. Sometimes that difference is plainly evident and the number of women of marriageable age largely exceeds the number of men of marriageable age. So it is possible that the total number of males in a country may be the same as the females, or may be more, but in the category which has reached the legal age of marriage, the position may be the reverse.

This position is fully clear from the latest issue of the population statistics of the U.N.O. for the year 1964.

For example, according to the statistics detailed in that issue the total population of the Republic of Korea is 26,277,635 and out of them 13,145,289 are male and 13,132,346 are female. Thus in the total population the number of males is more than the number of females by 12,943. This proportion in children below one year of age, and in children from one year to four years, from five years to nine years, from twelve to fourteen years and from fifteen to nineteen years of age has been uniformly maintained.

Statistics show that in all these age-groups the number of males is more than the number of females. Nevertheless, from twenty to twenty-four years of age this proportion is changed. The total number of males in this age-group is 1,083,364 and the total number of females is 1,110,051. From this age-group where the legal age of marriage for males and females occurs as we go upwards, the number of females is higher than the number of males.

Moreover, the Korean Republic is in an exceptional position in that in the total population the number of men exceeds the number of women. In almost all other countries, and not only in the years of marriage, the number of females is more than that of males; in the total population also the number of females is more than that of males. For example, in, the Soviet Republic the total population is 216,101,000 and out of them 97,840,000 are males and 118,261,000 are females. This difference exists before the age of marriage, and it is likewise seen in the marriageable years, that is, in the twenty to twenty-four year age-group, and in the twenty-five to twenty-nine year, the thirty to thirty-four year and the eighty to eighty- four year age-groups.

Similarly, in England, France, East and West Germany, Czechoslavakia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, America, Japan, and so forth. However, in certain areas such as East and West Berlin the difference in the number of women and men is more, conspicuous.

In India, even in the marriageable age, the number of men exceeds the number of women. It is only from fifty years upwards that the number of women exceeds the number of men. Perhaps the cause of the shortage in the number of women in India is the old habit of the superstitious people of that country who burn women whose husbands have died.

The latest census which was made in Iran showed that Iran is one of those exceptional countries where in the total population; the number of males is higher than the number of females. The total population of Iran, according to that census is 25,780,910 and out of those 13,337,334 is males and 12,443,576 are females, so in all males are in excess of the number of females by 893,758.

I remember that some of the authors who used to take exception to polygyny in their writings took this factor of the comparative population of males and females in Iran as a part of their evidence and used it as an argument against those writers who wrote in support of polygyny. In this way, they adduced that the law of polygyny should be annulled.

I was all the time surprised and distressed by the writings of these people, and wondered why they had not understood, first of all, that the law of polygyny is not confined to Iran, and that secondly what is important in connection with this subject is that we should know for certain whether the number of men fit to be married is really at par with the number of women of marriageable age, or whether it is more. The fact that the total number of males is greater than the total number of females is not by itself sufficient as far as the subject under consideration is concerned. We saw that in the Republic of Korea, and also in certain other countries, the total number of males is greater than that of females, but that amongst persons able to marry the number of females is higher than the number of males. Leaving alone the fact that in countries like Iran these census figures are not so very dependable, we should keep in mind the common partiality of Iranian women to pose as having given birth to a son to the extent that even in reply to census officials they would not be ready to declare that they had given birth to a daughter. Thus they see that a son is recorded instead of a daughter. This one thing in itself is sufficient to reduce our trust in these figures. The practical matter of supply and demand in our country is a sufficient proof of the fact that the number of women fit to be married is greater than the number of men. The reason for this is that, in this country, although polygyny was and still is practised from the cities to the villages and even among the tribal people, yet nobody has felt the shortage of woman and woman has not found a place on the black market. On the contrary this supply has always exceeded the demand. Girls or widows or young women who have been left without husbands by the force of circumstances have always been far in excess of unmarried young men. A man, however penniless or ugly, if he wants to get married, need never be disappointed, for there are many women who have been compulsorily left unmarried. These are every day observations which are more telling and more certain than any statistics.

Ashley Montagu, in his book The Natural Superiority of Women, while vainly attempting to explain that the strong inclination of women towards beautification and elegance arises from self display in public, affirms the fact of the greater number of women. He says, “All over the world the total number of women fit to be married taken together exceeds the number of men.
“The 1950 census showed that the number of women fit to be married in The United States of America exceeded the number of men by one million three thousand four hundred.”

Bertrand Russell in his book Marriage and Morals in the chapter concerning population writes: “There are in England some two million more women than men, and these are condemned by law and custom to remain childless, which is undoubtedly to many of them a great deprivation.”

A few years back we read in the Iranian newspapers that the enormous number of unmarried German women who, as a result of the great number of casualties among Germans in the Second World War, were deprived of having legal husbands and a family life, formally applied to their Government to annul the law of monogamy and to allow polygyny. The German Government, on the basis of this one formal application, asked the Islamic University of al-Azhar to provide them with a formula to implement this. We gathered information, afterwards that the Church had emphatically opposed this step. The Church preferred that women be deprived and that promiscuity should actually increase rather than that there should be polygyny, only because it was an Oriental and Islamic formula.

Causes of the excess of the number of women fit to be married over the number of men:

What is the cause of this? In view of the fact that births of girls are no more in number than births of boys, why should the number of women fit to be married be more than that of Men?

The cause of this thing is evident; deaths among the male sex are more than deaths among females. These deaths happen, generally, in those years in which man, if he were alive, might have been the guardian of family. If, for a while, we think over the casualties that occur due to wars, drownings, falls, burials under debris, collisions, etc., we shall see that most of these accidents and casualties are met with by men. Woman is rarely seen amidst these happenings. It may be a struggle of mankind against mankind, or a contest against nature but it is mostly men who meet with the casualties. If we only take war into consideration, we will see that from the beginning of human history there has not been a single day without warfare at several places in the world — and when man has not been a victim of mortality. This one thing is sufficient for us to understand why the balance of men and women of marriageable years is disturbed.

The total number of casualties in wars in the industrial age is hundreds of times greater than in the age of hunting and agriculture. The deaths among the male sex which occurred in the last two World Wars reached seventy million. This number is equal to the deaths among mankind as the result of war in the last few centuries. If you only keep in mind the wars that were going on a few years ago, and the wars that are still going on in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa, you will agree with us.

Will Durant says: “A number of factors have been effective in the decline of this custom (polygyny). An agricultural existence has an element of constancy in it. This kind of life lessened the hardships and discomforts to man. The dangers of life decreased and this was the cause for the number of men and women becoming almost equal.”[1]

This is a very strange thing that Will Durant has said. If the loss of life of men depended exclusively upon his encountering natural forces, then of course there might be a difference between the hunting age and the settled agricultural age. Nevertheless, the main cause of casualties among the male sex is war, and that was by no means less in the agricultural age than in the hunting age. Besides that, there is another cause of this thing. Man has always taken woman under his protection, and undertaken himself to do the hard difficult and hazardous tasks in which there was a danger of death. So this disproportion was maintained in the agricultural age just as in the hunting age.

Will Durant, does not make any mention of the machine and industrial age, while this period has created havoc in the life of men and the imbalance has become all the more glaring and obvious.

Women have more resistance to disease:

Another thing which is the cause of more deaths among the male sex than the female sex is an important factor which has recently been discovered as a result of the advances of science.

In 1956, the newspaper Itila‘at reported: “The French Office of statistics reports that although births of male children exceed births of female children, and although as against every hundred girls a hundred and five boys are born, yet the number of women is greater by one million five thousand and seventy-six than men. They attribute this difference to the resistance of the female sex against disease.”

In the magazine Sukhan (year 6; no.11), an article under the title “Woman in Politics and Society”, originally published in the illustrated monthly magazine of UNESCO, was translated by Dr. Zahra Khanlari. In that article it was quoted from Ashley Montagu that the nature of woman is scientifically superior to the nature of man. The X-chromosome, which is related to the female sex, is stronger than the Y- chromosome, which is related to the male sex. As a result, the age of woman is longer than the age of man. The average age of woman is greater than that of man. Woman is generally healthier than man. Her power of resistance against many diseases is greater. She mostly recovers sooner. For every stammering woman five stammering men are seen. For every colour-blind woman sixteen colour-blind men are found. The tendency to haemorrhage is almost particular to males. Woman has more stamina in duress. During the last war, it was everywhere confirmed that, in the same conditions, women fared better during the hardships of a siege, a prison or a concentration camp. In almost all countries the incidence, of suicide among men is three times that among women.

The view of Ashley Montagu concerning the greater resistance of the female sex against diseases was at a later period translated by Husamu’d-Din Imami from a part of the book The Natural Superiority of Women and was published in the 70th issue of Zan-e ruz.

The power of resistance of woman against disease may be the cause of a situation in which some day man may seek authority to take his vengeance on the female sex, to drag her to the hard and hazardous tasks in which there is a danger of death and destruction, especially to take her to the battlefield, and make her elegant body the target of shells, machine-guns and bombs, and to give her a taste of these activities. Even then, because of the greater power of resistance against disease, the balance of the number of men and women will not be disturbed. All this in connection with the first issue, that is, the comparative excess of women fit to be married over men in a similar position. Thus it has become clear that this is a true situation as its cause, and that the cause or causes have been and still are in existence from the very beginning of human history to this day.

Right of woman in polygyny:

As for the second issue, namely that the excess in the number of women fit to be married over the number of men creates a right in favour of the woman and a duty for men and married women, in so far as the right of marriage is concerned it is one of the most natural and the most basic right of human beings. This is something that cannot be argued. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to a family life, and should have their share of comfort in having wife, or a husband, and children. Everyone has this right, just as he has the right to work, to a dwelling, to profit from education and training, and from proper sanitation, and to have security and freedom.

Society should not only not create obstacles to the vindication of these rights, it should, instead, provide facilities for securing these rights.

In our opinion serious deficiency in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that it did not pay any attention to the right of marriage. This Declaration endorses rights like the right of liberty and security, the right to seek effective redress from national tribunals, the right to acquire and to give up nationality, the right to marry a person of any race and religion, the right of ownership, the right to form unions, the right to rest and leisure, the right of instruction and education. However, as for the right of marriage, that is, about the right to have lawful familial home, not a word is said. This right is all the more important for a woman, because a woman is more in need of family life. In a previous section we said that for man marriage is more important for its material aspect and for woman it is more important in view of its spiritual and emotional aspect. If a man abandons family life, he can, by indulging in love affairs and by having girl friends, satisfy at least half of his needs, but for a woman the importance of family life is more than just these things. If woman gives up the environment of the family, she cannot, by indulging herself in, promiscuity and love affairs, by any means satisfy, even to the slightest extent, her material or spiritual needs.

The right of marriage for a man means the right to satisfy an instinct, the right to have a wife, a partner, a trustworthy companion, and the right to have lawful children, but for a woman the right of marriage means, besides all these things, the right to have a protector, a patron, a dependable man to look after her feelings.

Now, after these two introductory remarks:

1. The comparative excess of the number of women over the number of men,
2. The right of marriage is natural human right,

we can derive the result that if monogamy is the only legal form of marriage, a large group of women will be, in practice, deprived of their natural human right (the right to marriage). It is only by the provision of the law of polygyny (of course with special conditions) that this natural right is revived.

It is thus the job of enlightened Muslim women to realize their real individuality and, in the name of just rights, in the name of morals, in the name of the most natural human right, to propose to the Commission of Human Rights of the United Nations Organization that Polygyny, with all the logical conditions which Islam has ordained, should be formally acknowledged. Thus the U.N.O. would do the greatest service to the female sex and to morality. But it should not be considered a sin for a formula to be presented by the Orient and accepted by the West.

Russell’s view:

Bertrand Russell, as we pointed out before, is aware to this point, that if monogamy is the only lawful form of marriage, it necessarily results in the deprivation of a large group of women. So, in Marriage and Morals, he proposes a solution. A wonderful solution indeed! The very simple and very easy way he puts forward that is this. The excess women should be allowed to hunt out men and bear fatherless children so that they may not remain deprived of having offspring. In view of the fact that a woman, when she bears a child in her womb, or during its infancy, is in need of material help, usually the father of the child, by means of maintenance, helps her. In the position suggested, the State would function as a substitute for the father and would give material assistance to her. After saying this: “There are in England some two million more women than men, and these are condemned by law and custom to remain childless which is undoubtedly to many of them a great deprivation.”, he goes on to say: “Strict monogamy is based on the assumption that the number of the sexes will the approximately equal. Where this is not the case, it involves considerable cruelty to those whom arithmetic compels to remain single. And where there is reason to desire an increase in the birth-rate, this cruelty may be publicly as well as privately undesirable.”

This is the solution which a philosopher of the 20th century proposes for this social problem and it is the solution which Islam proposed before. Islam says: “Solve this problem in this way, that one man possessing the necessary financial, moral and physical abilities should undertake to maintain more than one woman. He should give the second woman the position of his religiously lawful wife. He must not think of discrimination and difference between her and his first wife, neither between her children and the children of his first wife. The first wife, in the spirit of social duty, should, for the sake of her sister, make sacrifices. She should willingly agree to this kind of sharing and socialism which is the most immediate form of socialism.” This twentieth-century philosopher, on the other hand, says that the deprived women should steal the husbands of the other women, and that the fatherless children who thus come into existence should be maintained by the State. The view of this modern philosopher seems to be that a woman is in need of marriage only to three ends. One of them is the sexual urge and that can be satisfied by means of a display of beauty and charm. The other concerns having children, and that too can be secured at the same time by the way of stealing. The third objective is financial, and that should be given by the State. In the view of this celebrated English philosopher, among those things which have no importance, one is that woman is in need of the sincere affection of her husband, and requires that her husband should take her under his protection and that his attachment to her should not be only for the sexual matters in life. The other thing which in the eyes of this philosopher is of no consequence is the disturbed and unpleasant position of the child who is born into this world under these conditions. Every child, rather every human being needs to be known to the father and known to the mother. Every child is in need of the sincere love of the parents. Experience has shown that the mother of an illegitimate child who has not had enough loving attention from the father of that child, very seldom has love for that child. Whence would this deficit in the affections of love be provided and made up? Can the State fill up this gap?

Lord Russell is anxious that if his proposal is not made a law a large group of women will remain childless. Nevertheless, Lord Russell himself knows very well that the unmarried women of England do not have the patience to wait for that. They have, on their own, solved the difficult problem of being left unmarried, and have also created the problem of fatherless children.

One in every ten English children:

In the newspaper Itila‘at in December 1959 an article entitled: ‘Out of every ten British, children, one is a bastard’ appeared. “London-Reuters 16th December -A.F.P.- In the report which Dr. Z. A. Scott, a Medical Officer of the city of London, presented, it was noted that in London last year, out of every ten children born, one was illegitimate. Dr. Scott has emphasized that the number of illegitimate births is continually rising, and from 33,838 births in 1957 it rose to 53,433 in the following year.”

Without waiting for Lord Russell’s proposal to be made an Act of Parliament, the British nation has solved the problem themselves.

Polygyny is prohibited while homosexuality is lawful!

However, the British government took steps exactly in the direction opposite to the view of Lord Russell. Instead of proceeding to determine the proper course for alleviating the deprivations of unmarried women, they formally acknowledged the rivalry of the male sex against them and deprived them more than before of the male sex. They did it by way of enacting the law of homosexuality. In July 1961, the newspaper Itila‘at gave the news in these words: “London-After an eight hours’ debate, the British House of Commons passed the Homosexual Act and sent the bill to the House of Lords for approval.”

After ten days the above mentioned newspaper wrote: “The House of Lords has passed the Homosexual Act at its second reading. This Bill, which was sent for approval by the Parliament, shall soon receive the Royal Assent of Queen Elizabeth II of England.”

In England at present polygyny is illegal and forbidden, but homosexuality is permitted and is lawful.

In the eyes of these people if a man brings in a rival for his wife from the female sex, it is forbidden and is considered to be an inhuman act, but if he brings a rival for his wife from the male sex, it is an honourable and human act and is proper and befits the exigencies of the twentieth century. In other words, in view of those in power in Britain if a wife’s rival has a beard and moustache there is no harm in polygamy. It is said by some of our people that the Western world has found a solution for sexual and family problems, and that we should make use of the ways that they have adopted in solving these problems. Now, the Western world has found a solution in a way that you have seen.

The way that the West has paved out for themselves with regard to sexual and family matters could have led them only to these consequences and to no other. If they had reached some other result, it would have been a matter for surprise.

The thing which gives me much surprise and regret is why our men should have given up their ability to think. Why should the young and educated persons of the present day have less ability to analyse and evaluate statements? Why should they have lost their own identities? Why is it that when they have a precious jewel in their hand, and men on the other side of the world say that it a walnut, they believe them, and throw it away, but that when there is a walnut in the hand of a foreigner, and it is said to be a jewel, they become envious of it.