Gay Marriage Has Islamists Eyeing Polygamy
by David J. Rusin
National Review
April 16, 2012
[NOTE: The National Review
title is "Polygamy, Too: Muslims have started seeking
their own redefinition of marriage"; the following text
includes some material cut from the published version.]
Presidential candidate Rick
Santorum got
jeered for comparing the legalization of same-sex
marriage to that of polygamy, but, whether or not the
comparison is rationally sound, thoughts of the former's
facilitating the latter bring a smile to many Islamists. If
the definition of marriage can evolve in terms of gender,
some Muslims ask, why not in terms of number?
Islam sanctions
polygamy — more specifically, polygyny
— allowing Muslim men to keep up to four wives at once.
Though marrying a second woman while remaining married to
the first is prohibited
across the Western world, including all
50 U.S. states, a Muslim can circumvent
the law by wedding one woman in a government-recognized
marriage and joining with others in unlicensed religious
unions devoid of legal standing.
As Muslims have grown more
numerous in the West, so too have Muslim
polygamists. France, home to the largest
Islamic population in Western Europe, was estimated in
2006 to host 16,000 to 20,000 polygamous families — almost
all Muslim — containing 180,000 total people, including
children. In the United States, such Muslims may have
already reached numerical
parity with their fundamentalist
Mormon counterparts; as many as 100,000
Muslims reside in multi-wife families, and the
phenomenon has gained particular
traction among black Muslims.
The increasingly prominent
profile of Islamic polygamy in the West has inspired a range
of accommodations. Several governments now recognize
plural marriages contracted lawfully in immigrants'
countries of origin. In the United Kingdom, these polygamous
men are eligible to receive extra
welfare benefits — an arrangement that some government
ministers hope
to kill — and a Scottish court once permitted a Muslim
who had been cited
for speeding to retain his driver's license because he
had to commute between his wives.
The ultimate accommodation would
involve placing polygamous and monogamous marriages on the
same legal footing, but Islamists have been relatively quiet
on this front, a silence that some attribute
to satisfaction with the status quo or a desire to avoid
drawing negative publicity. There have, of course, been
exceptions. The Muslim
Parliament of Great Britain made waves in 2000 about challenging
the UK's ban on polygamy, but little came of it. In
addition, two of Australia's most influential Islamic
figures called
for recognition of polygamous unions several years
ago.
With the legal definition
of marriage expanding in various U.S. states, as it
has in other
nations, should we anticipate rising demands that we
recognize polygamous marriages? Debra
Majeed, an academic apologist for Islamic polygamy,
has tried to downplay such concerns, claiming
that "opponents of same-sex unions, rather than proponents
of polygyny as practiced by Muslims, are the usual sources
of arguments that a door open to one would encourage a more
visible practice of the other." Yet some American Muslims
apparently did not get the memo.
Because off-the-cuff remarks can
be the most revealing, consider a tweet by Moein
Khawaja, executive director of the Philadelphia branch of the
radical Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
After New York legalized
same-sex marriage last June, Khawaja expressed
what many Islamists must have been thinking: "Easy to
support gay marriage today bc it's mainstream. Lets see same
people go to bat for polygamy, its the same argument.
*crickets*"
The "same argument" theme is
fleshed out in an October
2011 piece titled "Polygamy: Tis the Season?" in the Muslim
Link, a newspaper serving the Washington and Baltimore
areas. "There are murmurs among the polygamist community as
the country moves toward the legalization of gay marriage,"
it explains. "As citizens of the United States, they argue,
they should have the right to legally marry whoever they
please, or however many they please." The story quotes
several Muslim advocates of polygamy. "As far as
legalization, I think they should," says Hassan Amin, a
Baltimore imam who performs polygamous religious unions. "We
should strive to have it legalized because Allah has already
legalized it."
Again and again the article
connects the normalization of same-sex marriage and Islamic
polygamy. "As states move toward legalizing gay marriage,
the criminalization of polygamy is a seemingly striking
inconsistency in constitutional law," it asserts.
"Be it gay marriage or polygamous marriage, the rights of
the people should not be based on their popularity but
rather on the constitutional laws that are meant to protect
them."
According to a survey
carried out by the Link, polygamy suffers from no
lack of popularity among American Muslims. Thirty-nine
percent reported their intention to enter polygamous
marriages if it becomes legal to do so, and "nearly 70
percent said they believe that the U.S. should legalize
polygamy now that it is beginning to legalize gay marriage."
Unfortunately, no details about the methodology or sample
size are provided, and in general quality data on Western
Muslims' views of polygamy are scarce and often
contradictory. Results from a recent poll
of SingleMuslim.com
users, many of whom live in the West, show significant
support for the religious institution of polygamy, while
findings from a more professional-looking survey
of French Muslims indicate little desire for legalization.
Nevertheless, the number of
polygamous Muslims and the opportunity presented by the
redefining of marriage make it very likely that direct
appeals for official recognition will ramp up over the next
decade, as more Muslims join vocal non-Muslims already laying
out the
case that polygamists deserve no fewer rights than
gays. In the meantime, watch for Islamists and their allies
to prepare for ideological battle.
For starters, one hears a lot
about the alleged social necessity of recognizing Islamic
polygamy. The hardships
encountered by second, third, and fourth wives who lack
legal protections are regularly highlighted, while polygamy
is promoted as a solution
to the loss of marriageable black men in America to drugs,
violence, and prison. Because polygamists who are not
legally married are known to abuse
welfare systems
— for instance, Muslim women in polygamous marriages often
claim benefits as single mothers — it would not be shocking
to see legalization pushed even as a means of curbing fraud.
These practical arguments are
supplemented with heavy-handed attempts to extol the
supposed virtues of Islamic polygamy, as in a Georgia middle
school assignment
featuring a Shari'a-lauding Muslim who tells students that
"if our marriage has problems, my husband can take another
wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared
for." Leftist academics such as Miriam
Cooke, who has peddled
the fiction that polygamy frees married Muslim women
to pursue lovers, will have a role to play as well.
Further, as more Muslims come to
view same-sex marriage as a springboard to polygamy, we can
expect to find more Muslims voicing support — sincere or not
— for gay rights. Case in point: "A Muslim American's
Thoughts on Gay Marriage," the saccharine essay
by author and environmentalist Ibrahim
Abdul-Matin celebrating New York's legalization of
such unions as a "victory" for all minorities. (One can only
speculate about his true motives, but Abdul-Matin's emcee
gig at a regional CAIR
banquet last December and his continuing
ties
to a mosque
headed by Siraj
Wahhaj, a radical imam who champions
polygamy, cast doubt on his moderate self-portrait.)
In addition, could the springboard hypothesis help explain a
2011
poll that recorded stunning sympathy for gay rights
among British Muslims, despite their documented abhorrence
of homosexual acts?
The good news for opponents of
polygamy is that eventual legalization remains far from
certain in the U.S. or elsewhere. State representatives will
not be rushing to introduce pro-polygamy bills when,
according to a Gallup
survey from last year, almost nine in ten Americans
still see the practice as morally wrong. Opinions can
change, of course, as they have regarding same-sex
marriage. Unfortunately for polygamy's backers,
however, the equality
arguments employed to great effect by gay marriage
advocates may ring hollow, in that recognizing polygamy —
which almost always takes the form of polygyny — would
essentially endorse
inequality between the genders.
Convincing American judges to
overturn restrictions will be an uphill battle as well — and
not just because of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1879 rejection
of the "religious duty" defense of marrying multiple
partners in Reynolds
v. United States. More recently, state supreme
courts have explicitly held the line against polygamy in
their rulings to extend marriage rights to same-sex pairs.
See Goodridge v.
Department of Public Health (Massachusetts,
2003) and In
re Marriage Cases (California, 2008); the latter
decision describes
both polygamous and incestuous unions as "inimical to the
mutually supportive and healthy family relationships
promoted by the constitutional right to marry."
Judicial criticism of polygamy
is not unique to the U.S. In a case concerning
self-proclaimed Mormon fundamentalists, the Supreme Court of
British Columbia upheld
Canada's ban on plural marriage last November after
the chief justice, in the words of the New York Times,
"found that women in polygamous relationships faced higher
rates of domestic, physical and sexual abuse, died younger
and were more prone to mental illnesses. Children from those
marriages, he said, were more likely to be abused and
neglected, less likely to perform well at school and often
suffered from emotional and behavioral problems."
Focusing on polygamy in the
Islamic world does not yield a happier image. Based on her
experiences in Afghanistan, feminist university professor
Phyllis Chesler has called
the practice "humiliating, cruel, [and] unfair to the
wives," and noted that it "sets up fearful rivalries among
the half-brothers of different mothers who have lifelong
quarrels over their inheritances." Likewise, Egyptian-born
human rights activist Nonie Darwish has elucidated
polygamy's "devastating impact on the healthy function and
the structure of loyalties" within Muslim families.
Recent studies have bolstered
these accounts. According to new research, Israeli
Arab women in polygamous marriages are worse off than
those in monogamous ones. A separate investigation uncovered
similar negative effects on Malaysian
Muslims. In addition, an academic
paper released this year concludes that polygamous
societies in general lag behind their monogamous
counterparts and explores the reasons for this, including
the increased tension and criminal activity that result from
creating
a surplus of single, low-status men.
There are many other
arguments against polygamy that supporters of
legalization will have to defeat, such as that expanding
marriage to three or more people would require massive
alterations of Western family law. However, neither
bureaucratic obstacles nor public exposure of the social
ills accompanying polygamy will deter polygamous Muslims
from seeking what they desire.
Recognition of polygamous
marriages would be a major win for stealth jihadists — and
the time is nearly optimal for them to make their move. How
ironic that laws benefiting gay couples may aid Islamists —
followers of an ideology
that
despises
homosexuals
— in their campaign to establish Shari'a in the Western
world.
David J. Rusin
is a research fellow at Islamist Watch,
a project of the Middle East Forum.
