http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI27Ak03.html Sep 27, 2006
KEBABBLE The cons of polygamy By Fazile Zahir (For the first article in this two-part report, The pluses of polygamy, please click here.) Some polygamous households thrive and can become huge, and yet even those vigorously practicing polygamy can see that it creates social issues. Mehmet Arslan Aga, a sprightly, pot-bellied, 64-year-old Kurdish village chieftain from Isuklar, seems an unlikely defender of monogamy as he has five wives, 55 children, 80 grandchildren and a small army of servants. But he insists that if he had his time again, he would only marry once. Although his large number of wives underlines his powerful status, he has found it a challenge to build each wife a house far from the others to prevent them from competing and struggles to remember all of his children's names. He recently saw two young boys fighting on the street and intervened, breaking up the fight and telling them they would bring shame on their families. "Don't you recognize me?" one of them said. "I'm your son." His biggest headache, though, he says, stems from jealousy among the wives, the first of whom he married out of love. "My rule is to behave equally toward all of my wives," he said. "But the first wife was very, very jealous when the second wife came. When the third arrived, the first two created an alliance against her. So I have to be a good diplomat." Apart from the need to play marital referee, Mehmet, who owns land and shops throughout the region, says the financial burden of so many offspring can be overwhelming. He explained, "When I go to the shoe shop, I buy 100 pairs of shoes at a time. The clerk at the store thinks I'm a shoe salesman and tells me to go visit a wholesaler." Despite his fecund lifestyle, Mehmet Aga acknowledges that polygamy is an outmoded practice and has taken personal steps to ensure that it is coming to a halt in his village. He has banned his own sons from taking second wives and is educating his daughters; he will not allow them to become second wives. He claims that his situation derives from his ignorance and the need to make tribal alliances. "I was uneducated back then, and Allah commands us to be fruitful and multiply, but having so many wives can create problems. If you want to be happy, marry one wife." Researchers into polygamy in Turkey believe the practice is a hangover from the Ottoman period when a harem demonstrated one's power, sexual prowess and wealth. However, modern research indicates that not all polygamous marriages are for selfish male reasons. Professor Remzi Otto, a sociology professor at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, says some men take widowed women and orphan girls as second wives to give them a social safety net. Certainly, some brothers take each other's wives and children into their own households when a brother dies. However, all over Turkey, by a multitude of different groups, questions are being posed about the viability of this ancient practice and about the injustice it creates. Last year, religious leaders in the Diyarbakir area met at the Ulu Mosque and debated the merits of a second marriage. This is an important issue for imams as they can be jailed for up to three years for officiating at polygamous marriages. Although the Koran explicitly allows polygamy, they concluded that too often the religious teachings were distorted for personal profit, and Imam Camisab Ozbek issued the following warning to local men: "Islam permits a man to take up to four wives, but only on the condition that each wife has her own property, assets and dowry. If a husband takes a second wife and doesn't behave equally toward her, when he dies he will be handicapped in the hereafter and go to hell." Women's-rights workers have other problems with polygamous marriages because second marriages are purely religious rituals that are not recognized by the state. Therefore, second wives have no legal status, which makes them especially vulnerable when marriages turn violent. Religious marriages confer none of the legally binding rights with regard to divorce, maintenance or inheritance under the Civil Code that state-registered marriages do. Eastern Turkey is already an area where women can't afford to lose what few rights they have. It is an area where women are the least economically active and independent. In western Turkey, the proportion of women working for pay is 40%, while in the east about 90% of women only have the status of unpaid family laborer. Traditionally, Kurdish women command a bride price as a dowry and this leads many men to regard themselves as having "bought" their wives and all rights over their bodies as personal property. Kurdish women have little protection under the law because of the tight, prescriptive family units they live in, and those who are second wives have fewer rights that anyone else. Polygamy puts women at risk because as second wives they are invisible. "These women can be abused, raped, mistreated and because their marriages aren't legal, they have nowhere to turn," said Handan Coskun. Coskun is the director of a women's center that has opened bread-making factories in poor rural areas where women can work and take classes on women's rights. She introduced Songul Fiktan, who was born blind and handicapped. Fiktan, 31, was forced by her family to marry her cousin's husband because her cousin could not conceive. Only on the wedding night did she learn that her husband was 65 years old. "I didn't know if my husband was young or old, handsome or ugly, I was forced into the marriage," she said, shaking and wiping her eyes with a corner of her headscarf. She gave him seven children, now six months to 15 years old, and her husband then told her he could not afford to support the family and fled. Left alone and with no recourse to the law, she moved to Diyarbakir, where she and her children became beggars until a local professor found her on the street and took her to Coskun's shelter. In these remote rural areas governed so strongly by tradition and family law, few are prepared to speak out against these practices. One of the few campaigners, Ayla Sumbul, teaches women to read and write in the slums of one of Anatolia's largest cities, Sanliurfa. She spelled out the consequences for wives who do not comply: "If the first wife complains, then she gets beaten, or the husband punishes her and the children by not providing them with food. She becomes a prisoner." Thus it is not just second wives who can suffer the effects of multiple marriages, but first wives too. It is often the case that a man is marrying a younger woman than his wife of perhaps two decades. In instances like this, polygamy is a kind of enforced menopause, with the older spouse losing the husband's physical attention and affection. The older woman is left in a situation of limbo with her husband no longer regarding her as a sexual being, whether this is the case or not. Like a racehorse past its prime, the first spouse is put out to pasture. Sociologists point out deeper problems inherent in polygamy, while monogamy reduces the amount of rivalry among males (because there is a greater chance that everyone will get a mate), polygamy increases it and contributes to creating a society where there is less trust and less of a sense of shared common interests. The logical conclusion to this train of thought is that the shortage of women polygamy produces increases the aggressiveness of a nation/people. Also, polygamy causes other forms of stratification in society. If those with many wives are the most successful men in society (ie, stronger, richer, more intelligent), they are monopolizing women at the expense of the weak. A separation between high- and low-IQ parts of the population becomes inevitable. Polygamy creates medical problems, too. In the relatively remote inward-looking villages where generations of people live in the same area, inbreeding is common. Repeated intermarrying within families, typically between first and second cousins, has produced abnormally high rates of children with Down's syndrome and Mediterranean anemia. While polygamy blights the lives of many individuals, its existence in Turkey is all too often used as a rod to beat Turkey's back by those opposed to accepting the country into the European Union. Handan Coskun commented, "The EU is looking for any excuse not to let Turkey in, and polygamy reinforces the stereotype of Turkey as a backward country." The religious marriages are used to portray Turkey as a country struggling to reconcile the secularism of the republic with Muslim tradition. Two years ago, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to attack polygamy by criminalizing adultery. The move came after prominent members of his party were rumored to have taken second wives, but he was forced to withdraw the adultery ban when the EU criticized Turkey for intervening in the nation's bedrooms. While the debate about and practice of polygamy in Turkey will continue for years, many find it difficult to reach a decisive opinion on it. Sixty-three percent of the public may think it is all right for a man to have more than one wife, but this doesn't mean that 63% of the public have polygamous marriages or that they personally would enter them. These two articles have tried to show that the issue has two sides to it for both the men and the women involved, and a history and legacy that spans generations. Polygamous marriage exists in Turkey, but the negative attention paid to it by the Western media far outweighs its actual prevalence in society. It is a dying tradition as Turkey modernizes and its women become increasingly emancipated - and it should be regarded as such. Fazile Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought up in London. She moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been writing full-time since then. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! 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