Keeping track of all those women

If you think your life is complicated, take a moment to empathize with Algerian-born Lies Hebbadj. He got in trouble with the French authorities after one of his wives was stopped for driving with a niqab.

The authorities became exercised when they discovered that Hebbadj apparently has four wives and 12 children, all of them on welfare. He then said he only had one wife; the rest were only his mistresses. Now it's a question of verifying the status of the marriage to a French woman that got him his French passport. If that marriage is invalid, he may be deported. (Thanks to Jihad Watch.)

What's quaint about this story is that polygamy is illegal in France. The same arrangement - receiving welfare benefits for polygamous marriages - is completely OK in the United Kingdom.

Polygamy in Denmark

Although exact data are hard to obtain, here's a report about polygamy among Muslims living in Denmark. Danish parliamentarian Naser Khader, who has been at the forefront of seeking to define a European Islam that conforms to Western law, warns: "It should be taken very seriously and fought in all ways. One can't just ignore it and say that it's part of Muslim culture."

Islamic divorce and polygamy

A privately-organized Saudi women's conference, the Saudi Divorce Initiative Forum, publicly discussed divorce in the hope of inspiring reform. Here are some of the problems women face:

-- women can be divorced without being either informed or present in the court.

-- judges often won't listen to a woman's pleading in a divorce case unless she is accompanied by a male relative.

-- the Saudi divorce rate is officially quoted as being 30%, but could be as high as 60%. Some women argue that the rate has increased because young men are now raised to believe that they should totally control their wives.

Meanwhile, an article in the Jerusalem Post paints a grim picture of polygamy as practiced by Israel's Bedouins. Even the husbands apparently suffer, according to an expert: 'With all the trouble, the feuds, the envy, the financial responsibilities - a man with more than one wife typically regrets it.' Which begs the question...but I'm clearly projecting my Western views onto another society, so I'll stop there. (Thanks to Dhimmi Watch.)

Here comes the harem

Daniel Pipes has compiled a useful list of Western governments (the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Ontario, Canada) where polygamy has made legal advances this year. Ireland is a rare case of a country that has refused to compromise.

While Pipes does not report any legal changes in the United States, he estimates that some 50-100,000 polygamists live here.

For more information on how polygamy degrades family ties, see my earlier entry quoting Nonie Darwish's Now They Call Me Infidel.

Polygamy in the Netherlands

The Dutch government, it turns out, has been taking a novel approach to data on polygamous unions - its Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) has been erasing multiple entries on the assumption that they are mistakes. Said one official, "A man with two wives just cannot exist by law." The CBS has been doing the same thing regarding registration of child marriages. Now the Amsterdam city council is suggesting that the polygamy cases be re-examined. No indication of whether the CBS will also come under pressure to trace the child brides. (Thanks to Islamist Watch.)

Belgium on polygamy

The Constitutional Court of Belgium on June 26 annulled an article of the alien law of 2006 that gave no right of family reunification to children born of a polygamous marriage. Now an alien living in Belgium can request that children from a second marriage, probably living in his home country, can legally immigrate to join him. (See this Islam in Europe entry.)

So is polygamy itself now legal in Belgium? I'm not a lawyer, so I leave that question to others, but I suspect that if it isn't, it soon will be.

Polygamy in California

This is actually an old story; the individual on trial, Mansa Musa Muhummed, was arrested in 1999, accused of having three wives and 19 children, whom he beat and starved - and lived off of, since he didn't work. Note that he uses (relevant) quotations from the Koran and Reliance of the Traveler to justify his actions. Read the details here, thanks to Dhimmi Watch. It will be interesting to see if this story is reported by the mainstream media.

The dynamics of polygamy

For those curious about the psychological and social effects of polygamy, I recommend the chapter on marriage and family dynamics in Now They Call Me Infidel, by Nonie Darwish. Darwish makes a number of points:

• Because men can have more than one wife, "the stage is set for women always to distrust their husbands. Nor can they trust women friends," because of the possibility that the friend might marry the husband. "The end result is an environment that sets women up as adversaries against one another, causing much unnecessary distrust and caution. Competitive relationships among women also deprive them of forming support groups ... Few Muslim women venture to form relationships outside the family or clan..."


• Next, "fear of polygamy makes it impossible for a wife to form a bond of trust with her husband. When a husband starts earning more morney, a warning bell starts ringing in a woman's head, since he can now afford the second wife ... Women's financial insecurity can affect many areas of family life, such as the raising of children, since child support can be very difficult to collect when there are other wives and their children involved ... Under Islamic law, a second wife - and third and fourth - are legally equal to the first in every way, including inheritance." Muslim property laws reflect this situation. Women keep the property they inherit from their family, because the families do not want the wealth to go to other wives and their children. "If a Western man chooses to marry his mistress, he must first obtain a legal divorce from his first wife and settle any financial issues with her before he can marry a second time. That makes all the difference."


• The result: "In order for Arab women to live and function around the social injustice and oppressive marriage laws, they had to develop elaborate manipulative behavior to get a modicum of respect and power."


• Nor are the women and children the only ones to suffer; "men are negatively impacted as well. Just as his loyalty to his wife is secondary, so is her emotional loyalty to him. "If she cannot feel secure in their relationship, neither can he." If husbands are shortchanged, it is even worse for those who do not marry. "Poor Muslim men have to compete with older, wealthier married men for single women."


• Finally, polygamy affects the structure of familial loyalty, as "the woman ends up shifting her loyalty to her firstborn son and her own blood relatives ... frequently, a woman's father or brother will step in to settle disputes with her husband, even after many years of marriage ... The end result is that family cohesion and structure is fragemented, and loyalties become tangled in endless complications."

Bigamy has its pressures

This item I found on the website of the Brussels Journal, quoting an article in The Daily Mail - I couldn't have made it up! See http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3152 for the full entry.

[O]ne motorist offered what must be a unique reason why he should keep his
licence. Mohammed Anwar said a ban would make it difficult to commute
between his two wives and fulfil his matrimonial duties. His lawyer told a
Scottish court the Muslim restaurant owner has one wife in Motherwell and
another in Glasgow – he is allowed up to four under his religion – and
sleeps with them on alternate nights.

Airdrie Sheriff Court had heard that Anwar was caught driving at 64mph in a 30mph zone in Glasgow, fast enough to qualify for instant disqualification. Anwar admitted the offence, but Sheriff John C. Morris accepted his plea not to be banned and allowed him to keep his licence.