The first time I learned that men could have more than one wife, I was 4 or 5 years old. My paternal grandmother and I were lying next to each other on the floor, I don’t remember whether at our place or hers. She would always tell me a bedtime story. My grandmother’s stories weren’t sweet. They didn’t have a Hollywoodian happy ending, nor did they necessarily include moral teachings. They were just very realistic.
That evening she told me the story of a young maiden who fell in love with an older man, got married but could not be happy because her husband’s first wife was too jealous of the new bride. Every day, the first wife would invent a new trick to make her suffer. I remember that this horrible first wife even dug a pit in a room, filled it with pieces of glass, covered it with the carpet, and then asked the 2-year-old son of the heroine to go and get her something, so that he would trip over the pit and cut himself into pieces.
My grandmother’s story did not say why her husband chose to have two wives, nor did it say why this happened despite the fact that the first wife clearly did not agree. My grandmother’s story tried to teach how to deal with an enemy at home with diplomacy and patience, the other woman being the enemy. Even if in the end her husband “made do with” one wife and did not want others, my grandmother, like all the women of her generation, would not question a man’s option of choosing a second or third wife.
“According to nature”
Growing up, I realized that the second wife appeared not only in my grandmother’s stories but in movies, novels, and TV series, endangering the well-being of the first wife like the lover in Western films. The only difference with Western stories was her husband’s justification: “I didn’t do something forbidden by religion.” In Western films, however, the traitor bore negative features, and the betrayed woman was allowed to get angry, be disappointed, and maybe even leave and decide never to forgive.
In the stories that I was hearing about as a child, the man’s desire to have more women was normalized to the point of justifying him when he was being dishonest, he was lying and ignoring the feelings of others. After all, getting married more than once was his “right.” So he was never the problem, because, as my religion teacher said, he did nothing but “behaving according to his nature“. The tale had to free the male from his responsibility, and turn the female, or the females, as the eternal problem.
Society and laws
Unlike the general belief, present-day Iran is strongly marked by an inclination towards monogamy as the only acceptable life model for a couple. Polygamy, on the other hand, is strongly condemned by public opinion, in spite of laws based on Islamic jurisprudence allow it, and of institutions which have cyclically attempted to promote it. Additionally, the increase in the level of education, as well as the constant contact with Europe, have created the idea of romantic monogamy as a human value.
However, as with a thousand other spheres, the laws in force in Iran do not reflect the lifestyle of the majority of the population. On the contrary, they are an imposition from above to change habits and traditions, to “islamize” them, obviously not in the true sense of the word, but in sense of promoting the Islamic model or interpretation that suits the vision of the Iranian theocracy.
The shari’a and the nikah
When it comes to the rules in force in the Islamic world, we have to make a distinction. One thing is the Islamic jurisprudence (فقه; fiqh), whose implementation, is based on the Islamic law (شريعة; shari’a ), that is founded on the comparative study of its main sources (the Qur’an, the Sunna, and other secondary sources). Another thing is the legal system of each and every Muslim country.
In the shari’a, gradually transformed into Islamic juridical norms, polygamy – or, to be exact, the matrimonial regime which is simultaneously polygynous and monoandric (تعدد الزوجات; ta’addud az-zawjat) – is part of the Islamic juridical norms that regulate marriage (نكاح; nikah) and allows up to a maximum of four wives, who all consent to each other’s marriage.
Polygyny in this sense is lawful (حلال; halal), but it is certainly neither mandatory (واجب; wajib), nor deserving (المستحب; mustahabb) and, according to many modern scholars, many Qur’anic verses (Qur’an An-Nisa 4, 3; Qur’an An-Nisa 4, 129; Qur’an Al-Ahzab 33, 4) regulate with very strict criteria, a widespread practice, in pre-Islamic times. Indeed, Islam theoretically imposes economic, social and affective equality among all the wives (up to a maximum of four, previously there were no limits), and requires that the husband must share his time equally among his wives. For this reason, many believe that the Qur’an itself recommend monogamy, in order to avoid unfair economic and emotional treatment.
Archaic rules
Personally, I believe that if a religion were really in the vanguard as many Islamists today affirm, it would choose for the total abolition of this practice, as it firmly did for the consumption of alcohol. Constantly describing an even worse antecedent situation does not justify the coexistence of a law that allows men to have sex with multiple women, while condemning a woman who has sex with a man by stoning. Pinkwashing archaic rules to keep them is not a revolutionary move.
Recognizing how many patriarchal rules have been incorporated into religious traditions to ensure their survival is the first step in distinguishing the key values we want to preserve, and the values considered ethical only by a society that no longer exists. The Qur’an reports several verses about how to treat slaves, but no scholar today would dream of justifying slavery, and the discussion is concluded ivery reasonably with a : “These 1400-year old rules.” Why don’t we apply the same principle to polygamy?
The icing on the cake concerns a law specifically in force in Shiite Islam: temporary marriage or muta’a (ﻣﺘﻌـة), which is the literal translation of “joy”. This form of marriage lasts for a predetermined temporary period: a few minutes, a few days, some weeks, some months, but it can even reach 90 years. The spouses’ obligations in this form of union are minor and, since the previous wives’ consent is not required for this specific form of marriage, many men choose this option in order to avoid asking for the other wives’ consent, and guaranteeing full economic and social support to the “temporary bride.”
The legal aspect in Iran
In Iran, a man can marry permanently up to four women, with the consent of the previous wives. The option of removing the need to obtain previous wives’ permission is cyclically discussed in parliament, because “many men use domestic violence to obtain the consent of previous wives.” Given this motivation’s ridiculous nature, despite constant government efforts to make the issue more culturally acceptable, the law, fortunately, remained unchanged. Despite this, in addition to the muta’a, previous wives’ consent is not required in the following cases:
- sterility of the first wife or previous wives;
- if the first wife refrains from fulfilling her marital obligations (simply put, she does not have sex with her husband);
- if the first wife fails, due to a physical or mental illness, to fulfill her marital obligations (simply put, she is unable to have sex with her husband).
The sign that persists
If my grandmother perceived the possibility of the arrival of a second wife as a probable danger that had to be prepared for with intelligence and shrewdness, my mother’s generation accumulated a lot of anger because of the lack of evolution in the field of women’s rights, and made the only thing it could do: educate us to not to put up with everything. However, years and years of government propaganda to normalize the male desire to have more than one wife, accompanied by nipping any attempt to improve the female situation in the bud, just reinforced the idea of being faced with a poisonous dish seasoned and served to imitate the best-starred chefs.
Islamic polygamy is sometimes mistakenly compared to polyamory, but the latter requires equality between partners, and a level of consent precluded by other Islamic rules in force for example in Iran or Saudi Arabia, such as the husband’s permission to travel or get a passport. In addition, the fact that men are educated from an early age in a society that allows them to think of having multiple wives as a possible “natural right” for them, nullifies any possibility that they make an effort to offer the level of transparency and sincerity without which communication in the polyamorous relationship would fail in a nanosecond.
My grandmother one night, giggling, told me the story of some officers who, in order to avoid arresting a man who had stolen a camel, made a list of the things he was carrying and actually hadn’t stolen. When the big picture is wrong, it is irrelevant that some details are right.
Kora Amani
translation by Pier Cesare Notaro
©2021 Il Grande Colibrì
images: elaborations from Fars News Agency (CC BY 4.0) / from Wallpaper Flare (CC0) / from Ba Tik (CC0) / from pxfuel (CC0)
