Every Western woman needs to understand both the negatives and positives of marrying into the Middle Eastern Muslim culture before taking a step that might change her life forever. She has to fully understand sharia law before stepping into Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries. Unfortunately many vulnerable American women are still lured by love, money, and promises. A good book on Arab culture and law might save them a lot of heartbreak later on in their marriages.
I realized at a young age that there were very few happy marriages around me. With few exceptions, it was a miracle of extraordinary good luck for a woman to find happiness and security in a Muslim marriage. If a husband stays married and faithful to his first wife, then it is a sign of his generosity and good graces. That wife should then thank her lucky stars and be eternally grateful to him and his whole family. For her good fortune, she becomes the envy of other women. However, in the back of her mind she is always in fear. Security for Muslim women in marriage may come later in life when a man gets older and more dependent on his wife. A Muslim wife can try to demand her husband’s exclusive loyalty and faithfulness, but their marriage contract does not require it, and there are no guarantees that his loyalty will hold in the face of the inevitable challenges to any relationship.
In modern Muslim societies, objections to this inequity are frequently dismissed with comments like “So what? Most Muslim men have only one wife anyway.” Some Muslim men jokingly say, “We can hardly even take care of one wife, let alone four, so why should we reform these laws?” However, these comments are insincere and do not address the terrible consequences of polygamy. They miss the point, which is the effect sharia laws have on all of society by virtue of their existence, even upon monogamous families.
As a teenager, I vividly recall watching the scene of a church wedding in an old Hollywood movie. I was very touched by the holiness of the marriage vows, especially when the husband promised to love, honor, and cherish his one and only wife “till death do us part.” And they said their vows to each other as two equals before God. That scene struck me so deeply that I wept over the beauty of those words. After the movie, I asked my aunt, “How come we don’t have weddings like that?” Her answer missed the point. “We do have very glamorous weddings too,” she said defensively, as if the issue was glamour or romance. I nagged her, without comprehending why. “No! We don’t have weddings like that!”
I now realize that my innocent mind was touched not only by the romance of the marriage vows but also by the way a Christian woman was honored and elevated by her husband and society, and by the stability and comfort that a monogamous union promised to offer a man and a woman—and their family.
In sharp contrast, Muslim weddings are more about sex and money. They do not convey the holy covenant of marriage. The traditional virginity check of the bride is no longer practiced among the upper classes but is still common among the less educated classes. In these more traditional weddings, there is an exchange of the dowry between the groom and father of the bride, and then the belly dancers lead the bride and groom to the bedroom for the virginity test. (Hymen rebuilding operations are sometimes done in the Muslim world to prevent a scandal or a tragedy on the wedding day.)
The Judeo-Christian culture has greatly contributed to humanity and the order of things in Western civilization by its insistence on the value of one man, one woman, joined in holy matrimony. It has resulted in a far more stable social order. Even though Islam is supposedly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the commandments and exhortations for monogamy seem to have been completely lost to the desert culture of Mecca. In matters of marriage and family, one society protects its citizen’s human rights and dignity and the other does not. The Western man lives as an equal partner with his one and only free wife. The Muslim man lives with up to four wives as a dictator.
For all the ills suffered by women because of polygamy, men are negatively impacted as well. Polygamy deprives men of the intimacy and security that belonging to one woman offers. A man knows deep down in his psyche that his loyalty to his wife “in sickness or in health, in wealth or poverty, till death do us part” is secondary. But deep down, he also knows that he cannot count on her emotional loyalty to him “in sickness or in health, in wealth or poverty, till death do us part.” If she cannot feel secure in their relationship, neither can he.
A man may decide to be faithful to one woman and never marry another, but in the back of his mind he always knows that his faithfulness is not required by God. While men may like fantasizing about having more than one wife, I believe that the majority of men do need the stability and intimacy of a relationship limited to only one woman. In the end, having many wives can have the same effect on a man as having none at all.
Polygamy made legal has a corrupting effect on men and becomes a burden and a temptation they cannot avoid in times of trouble. In practice, when the inevitable conflicts of marriage occur, many Muslim men resort to a second wife, or threat thereof, as their “solution” instead of working out the problem. Polygamy offers them an easy escape from their marriage when times get tough. Not only does it set up a disincentive to solve the inevitable crises of marriage, but it also robs marriage of the healthy give-and-take between partners, which adds to the stability of a marriage and teaches children about relationships and conflict resolution.
There is yet another negative effect of polygamy and Islamic marriage laws for men. Poor Muslim men have to compete with older, wealthier married men for single women. You see them, the throngs of angry, restless, young men who make up the seething Arab street. First, these young men are sexually repressed by the extreme Islamic sexual morality codes. And second, economic realities make it difficult for them to get married. In order to marry they must pay a dowry and provide an apartment in an economy where only the children of the rich can afford such things. After marriage they need to support their wives and the many children their society encourages them to have. Polygamy is unfavorable to poorer lower-class Muslim men and contributes to this imbalance, because many young women would rather become the second wife to an older, richer man than take a chance with a young, poor, possibly volatile man who is likely to become abusive, or at a minimum behave like a spoiled brat.
In the current climate, these young unmarried Islamic men are ripe for fundamentalism and jihad. Repressed, disaffected, unable to marry or afford an apartment, unable to get a job or unhappy in an abusive job, these young Muslim men see heaven with seventy-two virgins to service their every sexual fantasy as a tempting lure. After all, that is what they hear from their religious leaders day in and day out in their neighborhood mosques.
Married or unmarried, many Muslim men become pawns in a dysfunctional society. They are asked to give up their lives and become a shahid for the sake of jihad. Even their mothers and wives who love them are encouraged to show pride when they die in war or sacrifice themselves in acts of terrorism. The political and religious leaders who encourage them to do so have no intentions of dying as a shahid themselves.
One cannot help but ask: Why are there so many Muslim men ready to give up their life for shahada? Why would they choose to abandon their dominant role inside their home and the freedoms Islamic marriage law grants them? Could it be that they too are unhappy under the Muslim marriage contract? Is heaven with its promise of unlimited sexual pleasure their rescue from life’s disappointments and unhappy family life on earth?
It’s true that Muslim women have to juggle a complicated web of injustice, limitations, harm, and deceit. The Muslim marriage laws skewed in favor of men leave women in a very weak position, but that injustice obviously does not come free of cost to men and has a devastating impact on every aspect of Muslim society.
Marriage and divorce laws have numerous and profound effects not just on women and men, but the family unit, children, secondary relationships, and ultimately Muslim society as a whole. One of the basic roles of religion is to regulate the codes of behavior that will stabilize this
sacred marriage union for the benefit and good of children and of the greater society. For many centuries, polygamy has delivered a devastating impact on the healthy function and the structure of loyalties of the Muslim family. The source of all loyalty in the family is the one between husband and wife. Relationships extending out beyond the marriage depend on the stability provided by that man-woman unit.
Islam asks men to be fair and just among the wives and to treat them all equally. Perhaps the nomadic tribes in the desert found a way to achieve a just balance a thousand years ago. Perhaps it is an ideal that has never happened. In reality, a man’s loyalty thus divided between multiple wives can never bring peace, stability, and trust to any of the parties involved, including the children.
Beyond being unfair to women, polygamy has much deeper, unintended, damaging consequences to the healthy upbringing of children, including male children. As infants and children, Muslim men are raised by their oppressed mothers until an older age when the father takes over. A first wife’s loyalty to her husband is completely undermined if he takes a second wife or if she fears he will, and the woman ends up shifting her loyalty to her firstborn son and her own blood relatives. The son becomes her man and her defender, very often against his own father, whom he blames for marrying a second wife. At the same time, he has learned from his father and male relatives a sense of entitlement. These sons on one hand may be mama’s boys, and on the other hand, arrogant “spoiled brats.”
In addition to needing the protection and support of her eldest son against unjust treatment from her husband, frequently a woman’s father or brother will step in to settle disputes with her husband, even after many years of marriage. The unit of loyalty in the Muslim family is then transferred from husband-and-wife to mother-and-son or to mother-and-her-family versus husband-and-other-wives and husband-and-his-own-family, who very often cover up for his second marriage. The end result is that family cohesion and structure is fragmented, and loyalties become tangled in endless complications. Distrust and anger prevail, and elaborate behavior on every side takes place to protect everyone’s rights. None of this would be necessary if marriage was considered a holy covenant between one man and one woman, which would transfer the loyalty and trust to the basic nucleus of the family from where all trust comes: the husband and wife.
Even a woman’s name reflects the confusion in the family structure. Women in the Middle East do not change their last names to that of their husbands after they get married, as is common in the West. That is not because they are “liberated,” but because they live and die with their honor and loyalty belonging to their blood male relatives—their fathers and brothers. Unofficially, Muslim women become known by their son’s name such as Om Muhammad, meaning “Mother of Muhammad” or Om Ali, “Mother of Ali.” Their first son becomes their new identity, their true man and defender.
This mother-son bond leads to especially strained and bizarre relationships between mothers and daughters-in-law. When a son marries, a mother who had transferred her loyalty to her son suddenly may feel her position with her son is threatened. In some instances, she chooses the son’s wife, which helps place her in a powerful position in relationship to her daughter-in-law, especially in the first years of the marriage. The new wife must please her mother-in-law—as much as she must please her husband. Often the couple lives in the house of the mother, and the daughter-in-law ends up having to “serve her” more so than the mother-in-law’s own daughters. There are even cases among the poorer classes where the new wife is abused, both verbally and physically, by her mother-in-law—particularly in Islamic Pakistan.
In this messy sea of interlocking loyalties, the new wife is faced with a dilemma: by pleasing her mother-in-law, the wife might guarantee her in-law’s approval and consequently secure her support to convince the son not to marry another woman. On the other hand, the mother-in-law might encourage her son to get a second wife if she feels her daughter-in-law is not obedient enough. I have seen many such examples in Egypt even among educated and middle-class families. If this all seems confusing, that’s the whole point. It’s a disaster!
When Westerners criticize Muslim society’s discrimination against women, many Muslims proudly claim that women in Islam have more property rights than Western women. They say, “With all the oppressive laws to control women, how is it that their property is protected? After marriage a Muslim woman’s property is still hers.” That claim is misleading and taken out of context. Yes, women keep the property they inherit from their family—the concept of community (marital) property does not exist in Muslim culture, which I believe is due to polygamy. The personal property of a woman after marriage remains hers simply because her husband has the right to marry up to three other wives, and therefore her family has to protect their family property from going to additional wives and their children. These property laws, in fact, prove the point that a Muslim married woman is never secure as a result of polygamy laws. The woman and the man are two legally separate entities, and the finances of the two have to be separated. That’s because a wife must protect herself and her family’s assets from becoming the property of three other wives and their children. Her male relatives (brother and father) are still her protectors after marriage, and because of polygamy, she must entrust only them with her wealth. So the claims of Muslim scholars that Muslim women have more rights in regards to their property than Western women is only a partial truth. Furthermore, just as in court her statement counts as half the value of a male, a woman is also half the worth of a man when it comes to inheritance. Yes, under law, she receives half the amount of inheritance of a male relative.
In addition to other wives, a man’s father, mother, and siblings also share his inheritance with his wife and children. I remember my aunt asking her husband, a wealthy businessman, who had parents and many brothers and sisters, to give her a will to transfer all his wealth to her and her five children at his death. He refused, saying that he wanted God’s sharia inheritance laws to stay in place. Then he jokingly asked, “Why? Do you want to be a rich widow and remarry?” When my aunt’s husband eventually died, his mother, father, and siblings shared his inheritance with her and her children. My aunt ended up with only about 20 percent of the inheritance.
There are, of course, many exceptions to the marriage and family tragedies in the Muslim world. I am sure there are Muslim women who are happily married. There are also many good Muslim men who are faithful to their wives and treat them as equals. You will also find rich Muslim widows whose luck changed later in life, even though they started their lives as typical oppressed Muslim women. Their lives usually changed over the years after a large inheritance, which allowed them to achieve independence.
But for the vast majority, the changes needed at a grassroots level have not yet happened in the Muslim world. In order for Arab feminists to succeed in their attempts to achieve reforms for women, they have to take their cause not just to the courts, but also work within the larger context of political and social reform to achieve democracy. Many think that time will cure fundamentalism and radicalism in Islam. However, we have seen just the opposite to be true. In recent decades, the clock has turned backward, and reform has become more difficult.
Tightly controlled through various religious laws and taboos, Muslim women are left blind to their natural human rights. Under the thumb of an authoritarian society, they live and die never knowing of any other options, totally ignorant of the rights that many women in other societies enjoy and even take for granted.
The majority of Muslim women see no escape route from their plight. Even after death, in the paradise of Islam, women are given the short end of the stick. The idea of heaven is a lustful man’s dream and a woman’s nightmare. Since men who die as shahid are promised seventy-two virgins, a woman in Islam’s heaven is supposed to be servicing men’s sensual desires together with about seventy-one other women. Islam has once again been extra-generous to men at the expense of women. Polygamy fo
llows them in heaven.
The natural reaction for women to resolve this repression could be either to revolt or to end up becoming even more radical and religious than her male counterpart. Revolting is regarded as anti-Muslim and against Allah’s commands, and that makes it out of the question for many Muslim women. For some, the solution ends up being, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” The only door left open for them to achieve power and respect is through compliance and becoming a part of the larger system that oppresses other women. To many the veil then becomes a woman’s symbol of honor, power, and respect; her female form of jihad.
Ironically, compliance thus becomes a technique for escaping discrimination and a way out of oppression. Many Muslim women themselves have no tolerance for Muslim “feminists” who want to change the system. Some even go as far as exposing “the bad Muslim women” who do not adhere to the rules of proper behavior. Hence, most attempts for change by Muslim feminists end up rejected, ridiculed, or diluted. They are accused of apostasy and obscenity.
Attempts to reform sharia marriage laws are quickly silenced by today’s Islamic religious tyrants. A secular couple in Muslim society is viewed as a great threat, thus Muslim law can divorce them! This has even gone as far as attempting to impose a divorce brought to the court by a third party upon an unwilling couple as punishment for their holding secular views. A scholar by the name of Nasr Abu Zayd faced such an attack in court and had to flee Egypt with his wife.
Several brave, moderate Muslim women’s groups have risen and fallen, and few remain standing to fight for reform and change. Most often they are blocked by dead-end courts and fatwas (death warrants) issued against outspoken Arab women. Farag Foda, a human rights activist and an advocate of women’s rights in Egypt, was accused of apostasy and gunned down in front of his Cairo office in 1992 by Islamists even though he had never criticized Islam. His killers defended the murder by calling it a “righteous act.”
Now They Call Me Infidel Page 10