Multiple marriages are on the rise in the U.K.’s Muslim communities—and the women are the ones seeking out second-wife status. Jamie Dettmer reports from London.
Aisha laughs out loud at the thought of how her colleagues and clients would react if they knew she shares a husband. The laughter makes her loose hijab slip slightly, exposing a few strands of dark hair. “They would be dumbfounded and probably prurient,” she sniffs. As far as they are concerned, her 42-year-old factory-owning husband has only one wife—this thoughtful attorney sipping Earl Gray tea in the sitting room of a pleasant and very middle-class Edwardian house in a leafy residential road in northwest London.
Her immediate family and close Muslim friends know the truth: 41-year-old Aisha is a second wife and for three years has been conveniently—at least for her—sharing her businessman husband with his first bride. “It was my choice to marry him. There was no coercion.” With a wry giggle she says: “I wanted a partner and man-hunted for one using a marriage agency and this suits me.”
“I didn’t want to remain single and I wanted my relationship to be endorsed by my religion, so sleeping around or living with a non-Muslim wasn’t an option,” she says. “This works for me.”
Being a co-wife is a situation that apparently works for other successful British Muslim women, who have delayed marriage to build careers and discover that by the time they are ready for a husband, their age counts against them and they don’t have the pick of the crop. For them, sharing a husband is a practical solution that allows them a suitable partner and stable companionship all sanctioned by Islam.
And it has the added bonus of allowing the women to retain the independent lives they have developed for themselves during their single years. “I didn’t want a full-time husband,” Aisha says firmly.
She admits that the first wife, whom her husband married 15 years ago in an arranged union, wasn’t initially happy with the arrangement but has “come round,” although the two wives have little to do with each other and seldom meet. Aisha sees her husband on alternate days and nights—although if either of the two children from his first wife falls sick, or there’s a family emergency, Aisha will be compensated for any time lost as a result of timetable changes.
The unexpected trend of professional British Muslim women agreeing to become second or third wives has startled Islamic religious leaders, some of whom disapprove, and is now gaining political attention with British Conservative politicians vowing to stamp out the practice—although how theoretically they will accomplish this remains unclear. Under U.K. law multiple marriage is illegal, but co-wives are exploiting loopholes.
The attitude of these co-wife professionals stands in marked contrast to those of many liberal female activists in the Middle East, where, in the wake of the Arab Spring, polygamy is experiencing an upsurge.
Under dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Col. Muammar Gaddafi, multiple wives were discouraged. Now, the issue has become a clashing point in the region’s culture wars. In February, liberal activists in Libya bristled at an Islamist-inspired judicial decision that makes it much easier for men to take on multiple wives. Activists such as Farida Allaghi, a veteran human-rights campaigner and founder of the Libyan Forum for Civil Society, warned Islam was being hijacked by men and argued the Arab Spring was seeing a lurch toward religious conservatism.
But the part-time wife trend in Britain would seem to be less of an expression of religious conservatism and more a reflection of what could be described as Muslim libertarianism. The professional Muslim women say they are adapting Islam for their purposes and making it work for them in the modern Western world. They are the proactive ones, seeking to be co-wives, rather than being pressed into such marriages, say Muslim dating agents.
They say, ‘I have a career, I have a business but I don’t have time for a full-time husband. I want a stable relationship, but it needs to revolve around my schedule.’”
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Categories: Europe and Australia, UK
Quoting from the same page:
brother Zia: In those days it was also illegal to ‘cohabit together without being married’. To be charged with Bigamy one would have to perform two marriage ceremonies in England. That would only be possible by cheating: claiming at both marriages that both partners were single. That would be fraud. Now ‘cohabitation without valid marriage’ is legal (in most countries, here we speak of England). Therefore ‘religious marriages’ without a ‘civil contract’ cannot be prohibited. Technically it is ‘cohabitation without a valid (by civil law) marriage document’. I do not recall that in this century anyone was punished for it. Even in the USA, where polygamy is practiced by so-called fundamentalist Mormons, the ‘law’ which tried to go after them, has not been able to persecute them for the ‘crime’ of polygamy. Usually they manage to ‘catch’ some of them for marrying ‘minors’ or even such crimes as tax evasion or cheating the social security act.
This practice of Musims having one legal wife and one unofficial (“Islamic Nikah before a sheikh” is more common than one knows in USA. This is more common among Arab-Americans.
The first wife usually does not have any say in it. This kind of practice, though legal, is still has misogynist component in it.
I was talking to an Anglo Australian about Islamic marriage and multiple marriages and he asked “if I’m a Muslim and married to four women – can I have sex with all of them together?” How can we make sense of Islamic marriage to these heads. Impossible.
Aziz Bhatti: Well, I recall two notices in the Arab Newspapers regarding this. In one message one wife complained to the court that her husband wanted to have sex with both his wives together and she objected. The Court said that ‘we cannot find anything in the sharia prohibiting this’. In a second case (just recently) the court in Dubai granted a divorce to a second wife, who did not want to join the first wife in the same bed (again and again…). If we take these two recent rulings together the answer could be ‘yes, if all agree’. (I am just quoting the News. I am not a sharia-scholar).
Jaseem Pasha, the thing is, many women don’t like their husbands to remarry. But according to Islam they have the choice to seek divorce if they cannot live in that situation. They are not “forced” into it.
I know some women in very unhappy marriages whose husbands wanted to remarry but they would not let them. So what’s the result, just an unhappy marriage? So speaking in liberal terms, those women still don’t gain anything other than just keeping their husbands from remarriage, just because they know their husbands will not divorce them due to social pressure, kids etc. Doesn’t sound healthy to me.
In fact, if the husband does not like the first marriage and especially if he’s not a good husband, isn’t it better for the first wife that he remarries and be away for a while?
At times, men would have to divorce their first wives in order to remarry if they were not allowed to have more than one wife. In Asian societies for instance where children are important and the first wife cannot have any.
Ultimately the happiness or unhappiness of the first wife depends on the kind of relationship she has with her husband to begin with. If she felt loved, and knows there are reasonable reasons for remarriage, she may remain to stay happy afterwards. If there was never love and trust to begin with, there is nothing that will keep her happy in that marriage whether the husband marries another or not.
and thank you, Sister Qudsia, for your very logical thoughts …
When polygyny is based on mutual love and respect and wives get along well, then these relationships are great for women that live busy professional lives. They have freedom and at the same time are blessed with a faithful committed husband. Seems like a win-win situation.
A Mormon.