Too
Many Wives
Too
Many Wives
By Joe Bob Briggs
January 25, 2002
The feminists are gettin all lathered up about polygamy in Afghanistan. They don't like it when men keep installing new wives in the house--the law says they can take up to four-- because they should be doing it the way we do it in the West: marry 'em one at a time and ditch the old one.
I personally think the Afghan men should stop doing this, too, because I've read the rules and regulations involved when you fall in love with a sweet chickie in the bazaar and add her to the household--and this is an absolute nightmare. I can't imagine anything more horrifying than four wives in one house-- and they are not big houses--arguing over which rug goes in the den and whose turn it is to beat the laundry with a rock.
Most of the time all the politial decisions are handled by Wife No. 1, who is regarded as the Queen Bee Mother of All Mothers and gets to order the younger wives around. But when the major catfights begin, the husband has to hold formal arbitration hearings and live with the consequences. Think about it. One pouting woman can destroy a man's concentration for a week. Three grudge-bearing females constitute a revolutionary cell plotting against your ability to sleep.
Not only that, they all have children. There are daughters around. (Sons, too, but the sons don't live and die over issues like when the house got whitewashed the last time.) There are cousins, mothers-in-law, nieces, women from the neighborhood--you end up with a whole village with opinions about who you're taking to the Friday afternoon soccer game.
Of course, the feminists would say it's not a village but a women's prison. But who wants to run a women's prison?!
What's strange to me is that normally, when you find an exotic practice like this in a Third World country, the anthropologists tell us to just leave it alone. Don't disturb the native culture, right? National Geographic writes about it. Margaret Mead devotees send expeditions over there to write doctoral dissertations on "The Socio-Economic Structure of the Four-Wife Family." There are lots of tribal cultures that have some version of polygamy, including South Pacific islanders and Eskimos, but nobody organizes international protests to make em stop that right now.
Mostly the pressure to abolish polygamy is coming from feminist groups in America and France. America has a few polygamists out in Utah, but we try to jail em every chance we get, regardless of how many wailing wives appeal to the courts. The American movie-star playboy, on the other hand, is allowed to keep harems in every world capital, and he's just regarded as eccentric. France, on the other hand, has polygamy as a lifestyle. At any rate, America and France are regarded by the rest of the world as the most liberal and free cultures in the sex department, so this can't really be about sex.
So my question is: What precisely bothers people so much about this? It's not a human-rights issue if the women more or less accept it. There's a famous Russian film from the seventies in which a Soviet commissar is sent to the wilds of Tajikistan to inform the locals that from now on, by decree of some Politburo committee, every man can have only one wife. The women revolt, telling him in no uncertain terms that there's no way they're going to shoulder all the household work themselves, and they eventually send him back to Moscow without a single convert to the new Communist family-planning policy.
But now we have neo-Communist international family-planning meddlers in the form of groups like Negar, in Paris, which seeks equal rights for women in Afghanistan. "Polygamy may have made sense at the time of the Prophet Mohammed," president Shoukria Haidar told Newsday, "but it has no place in modern Afghan society."
Then they get into revisionist interpretations of the Koran, arguing that the reason Mohammed allowed four wives to each man is that he wanted men to take care of the widows. In other words, it was only intended for times when there was a shortage of men, and now that there is no man shortage, we should just sorta rip those pages out of the scripture.
We do know from the Old Testament that it was common for a man to take his brother's wife as his own when his brother died. But there were other reasons, too, for having multiple wives in many ancient cultures. Part of Mohammed's thinking was to have the maximum number of children so that Islam would become stronger than its enemies. After all, women do have that "down time" when they're pregnant, whereas men can keep busy repopulating the earth 365 days a year.
It makes sense to me, for example, that the Pashtuns would want to have families of 50. The Pashtuns don't care whether they live in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They're not gonna be happy until there's a Pashtunistan, and they've even marked out the boundaries of where they think it should be. Almost every historic tribe feels this way. They regard themselves as independent countries--and when independent countries are landless, they always preach having the maximum number of children. The Palestinians do it. The Kurds do it. The feeling is that, "We've gotta outnumber the SOB's. It's our only chance."
But what makes me think they're serious about it is that, when they get a new wife, they still keep the old one. That's somebody who's seriously dedicated to reseeding the earth. They even pay huge dowries for the new wife. The European tradition, on the other hand, is for the family of the wife to pay a dowry, indicating that they're happy to have somebody take her off their hands. So which one puts the higher value on women?
There's been a lot of noise lately about "respecting and understanding Afghan culture." One way to respect it would be to leave it the heck alone.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
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