By Ermiza Tegal
Last month a news report suggested that the final obstacle to placing a bill before Parliament to reform Sri Lanka’s Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA) of 1951 (as amended) is the question of whether the practice of polygamy should be permitted or not.
Some claim that polygamy is a fundamental element of the religion and cannot be curtailed and some say it can be permitted under strict conditions. There are also those who believe that it can be completely restricted to respond to the harmful effects the practice of polygamy causes to Muslim women, children, and families as a whole.
I am writing this article to urge, in particular, the yet unconvinced Muslim reader to consider the possibility that the complete restriction of polygamy is fundamentally consistent with Islam, its jurisprudence, and its values. This approach centres the prevention of harm to Muslim women and children and, more broadly, to Muslim families in Sri Lanka. I will not be making arguments that draw on constitutional guarantees and international human rights law here.
The harms caused by polygamy
In my own experience of advising on Muslim family law disputes, I have come across such profound hurt and harm that has been caused by the practice of polygamy.
I particularly recall an older woman who found out after over 20 years of marriage that her husband had another family, a second wife who was the same age as their daughter. She came to know of the second marriage when she was asked to move out of the home to make way for the second wife.
The woman would recount all the times she sacrificed her comfort for her husband, even during illness, to make ends meet and to ensure he was looked after. The memory of her agony and her questions of disbelief at what was happening to her remain with me. Their daughter too was devastated and felt betrayed. He refused to support either of them.
Last year, I was also stunned to witness a mother pleading for maintenance for her seven young children from a father who had several other wives and 20 children in all. The man was refusing to maintain them until the woman and children, who had escaped physical violence at his hands, returned to his residence. She was a victim of the practice of polygamy and a system of justice that did not assist her.
The reality is that Muslim women’s organisations in Sri Lanka have been raising their concerns about the harms resulting from polygamy for decades. If one were interested in a typology of harms, some common types of harm are mentioned in the Muslim Personal Law Reform Action Group (MPLRAG) Policy Paper on Polygamy of 2022. I have summarised a few below:
- Husbands making threats to wives about taking another wife with the motives of extracting work, obedience, money, and non-consensual physical and sexual activity.
- Abandonment of existing wife or wives after the next marriage is contracted.
- Failure to maintain the existing wife and children after the next marriage is contracted. Women unable to maintain, provide food, provide security, and ensure proper education for children causes intergenerational harm and loss of opportunity to secure education and employment.
- Second and third marriages contracted without registration. Birth certificates of children from such marriages often do not bear the name of their father. This causes problems at schools and loss of inheritance.
- The practice fosters amongst Muslim men the false sense that they do not need to afford Muslim women dignity and respect.
- Loss or erosion of love, affection, kindness, and tranquillity as Islamic virtues of intimate relationships. The practice reinforces a hierarchical power-based relationship rather than one of mutual respect and responsibility, compassion, and security.
- a) ‘Why abolish it, it is hardly practised’
- b) ‘It is a privilege bestowed by God and cannot be removed’
- c) “If abolished, we will be encouraging adultery.”
- a) If it is hardly practised (which is not true), should we still not prevent harm?
- b) Where in the Qu’ran or Sunnah has polygamy been described in terms of a right or privilege?
- c) Are we putting women, children, and families at risk of harm for the purpose of giving men a ‘respectable’ means of having multiple sexual partners?
- https://www.mmdasrilanka.org/polygamy-in-sri-lanka/
- https://www.musawah.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Policy-Brief-3-Ending-Polygamy.pdf