Feminism And Polygamy

Islamic Feminism & Islamic Family Law (Polygamy)

By Muhammad Ali Bin Rohani

Introduction

Muslim feminism has been addressing issues and concerns regarding Muslim women politically, socially and economically. One of the areas that this movement focuses on is gender equality especially in Muslim family law. Most of the Muslim feminists view some of the Islamic family laws related to polygamy, divorce, wife obedience, beating of wife, inheritance and others to be conflicting with gender equality.

This writing is going to discuss the views of the Islamic feminist movement on one of the most debatable Islamic family laws among the scholars in the Muslim world, polygamy and inheritance.

The reason for focusing on this is because there are more

This reflects the patriarchal society where men are viewed to more superior than women.

They argue based on the idea that there are more women compared to men thus giving men the permission to exercise polygamy that not every country the woman out-numbered men. In Indonesia for example the population of men are more than women according to statistics in 2005.

They raise the issue of women’s fertility as the reason for polygamy because if the wife can 't conceive, the man should be given the right to have a second wife to have offspring. The modernist argues that it might be the man who is infertile and not the woman.

They also raised the concern that polygamy brings negative effects to the wife and children. The wives will generally get neglected by the husband and the children may not receive the father’s attention or he may not carry out his responsibilities because he will give more attention towards his new wife. Generally men choose to marry young and virgin women compared to the widows and that defeats one of the objectives of polygamy, which is to protect women or

Polygamy addresses the issues of extra marital affairs among men. Polygamy ensures that women have full recognition of their rights –even as a second wife- rather than being used by men to engage in extramarital affairs.

They highlighted the most important requirement for a man to exercise polygamy which is to do justice to his wives in areas such as monthly maintenance, shelter, number of days spent together and treatment. He is not required to have the same feelings towards each wife as that is beyond his control. If a man is afraid that by exercising polygamy he will not do justice towards all his wives then it is prohibited for him to do so.

In the case of war, where many men will be casualties, the need to carry out polygamy arises especially to protect the widows and the orphans. "Polygamy is an alternative to divorce in the case of some marital problems. Instead of divorcing a sick or infertile wife, Islam permits a man to marry another woman while taking care of the first if she chooses to stay with