Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World by Jan Goodwin

Author:Jan Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780698157798
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

When I returned to my hotel that evening, the apparent emptiness of Iman’s life depressed me. I couldn’t imagine myself being prepared to make such personal sacrifices, but then, of course, I also didn’t share Iman’s staunch faith in her religion. And I found myself wondering about single friends and colleagues in the United States in their thirties and forties who, like Iman, were bright, attractive, personable women. Many of them complained they went years between relationships, even between dates. If offered a chance to be a second wife in a society that accepted polygamy, a chance to have a part-time husband, rather than coming home to an empty apartment night after night, I wasn’t sure they would all refuse.

Once common in the Islamic world, polygamy began to die out in many Muslim countries in the 1960s and 1970s. As life became more expensive, fewer men could afford to support more than one wife, and as more Muslim women became educated, they began to resist becoming co-wives. For Muslims emulating a Western lifestyle, polygamy simply stopped being fashionable.

The Islamist movements are working hard to reverse that trend. Friday sermons in many mosques encourage it, hefty financial inducements are offered, and women themselves are encouraged personally to select another wife for their husbands, as an ultimate expression of their respect and esteem both for their spouse and the religious orthodoxy they follow. Over and over it was stated that not only was polygamy a man’s Islamic right, it was also his biological necessity. Fidelity to one partner was a requirement for women, for men it was not deemed desirable.

Hind, Iman’s Islamic teacher, had raised the subject at one of the meetings at her home. She had said that if her husband announced that he wanted to marry again, she would not deny him permission. “I don’t say I wouldn’t feel sad or jealous. I’m a human being, I have feelings. But I must prefer that one man take care of two wives, two sets of children, instead of my husband having one wife, and then going to a prostitute and bringing home AIDS or some other disease to me. I also believe that if I give up something in life, such as being an only wife, Allah will give something else instead.

“Certainly, the first time my husband goes to his new wife, spends the night with her instead of me, I may not be able to sleep. For the first few times, yes. But I can overcome these feelings of jealousy. When he is with his other wife, I can be using that same time to read the Koran, to pray, to revise my religious classes.

“A man is not everything in my life. Allah gave him to me, and I respect my husband. But I have always thought of a man as if he is an arm to me. If my husband dies, should I die also? No, of course not; life will go on. I respect my husband, but I also have my own life, my mission, my children.

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