The Promise of Patriarchy by Ula Yvette Taylor

Author:Ula Yvette Taylor [Taylor, Ula Yvette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469633930
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Question of Polygamy

Whatever he may have done in private, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad never publicly sanctioned multiple wives. In fact, in January 1974 he published a notice in Muhammad Speaks to all members who had written him “asking for freedom to take other women and other men.” He responded, “You stand today as much to be charged with committing fornication and adultery as you were before you ever heard Islam!”73 Obviously, he perceived his own domestic affairs differently, and no follower had the authority to place judgment on Allah’s last Messenger. Reports claim that by 1975, he had nineteen children, eight by Sister Clara and the others by the secretaries.

Yet the paternity-suit scandal had a long-lasting hold on the imagination of some Nation members, who continued to feel that Elijah Muhammad’s example justified polygamous households. This had a profound effect on women in the NOI, both those in the background and those in the national (and international) spotlight.

After her divorce from her first husband, Brother John 24X, Sister Doris 9X quickly became a target to be “someone’s second wife.”74 As she recalled, by this time, in 1974, “rumors were flying right and left about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad having more than one wife. Everybody wanted to jump on the band wagon.”75

She was first approached by a couple who said they wanted to give her and her daughter a better life. Sister Doris 9X was taken aback and reported them to Minister Jael. Soon thereafter the minister’s own wife, Sister Ariel, invited her for tea and inquired if she was interested in becoming a wife. Sister Ariel was fifty years old, childless, and wanted “a baby in the worst way,” remembered Sister Doris 9X.76 Sister Doris 9X replied, “How can a woman ask another woman to have a baby for her husband?” On leaving she said to Sister Ariel, “Allah doesn’t want me to share another woman’s husband.”77

For a single mother in the NOI, the pressure to remarry could be either extraordinary or lax, depending on the number of registered mosque brothers. Elijah Muhammad’s statements against polygamy did not protect Sister Doris 9X from repeated requests that she become a second wife. Reasoning that the only way to keep second-wife offers at bay was to choose another husband, she married Brother Mahad, even though his income was not enough to create the stable household she craved. Sister Doris 9X paid a high price for that decision when she lost her legal freedom on the charge of welfare fraud, as I discussed earlier.

Around the same time, Sister Belinda Ali’s life was complicated by her husband’s desire for a second wife. Sister Belinda was the mother of four children (Maryum, born in 1968; the twin girls Rasheda and Jamillah, born in 1970; and Muhammad Jr., born in 1972). Her husband already had two additional daughters outside of their marriage, by two different mistresses: Miya (1972) and Khalilah (1974). Sister Belinda admitted that “for a long time, his seeing other women confused me.”78 He initially kept the other women in secret and then “use[d] the religion as an excuse.

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