Terrorism and Polygamy
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Polygamy and Terrorism
By William Tucker
After almost four years of dealing with Al Qaeda, jihad, Iraq, and Muslim terrorism, it is obvious that we are up against something we have never encountered before in our history.
We have fought and defeated a Nazi regime that was unprecedented in its cruelty and intent on wiping whole peoples from the earth. We fought and defeated an Imperial Japan and helped turn it into a modern nation. We fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars and saw how the portions of Asia we rescued thrived while those that fell under Communism turned into bleak totalitarian societies.
But we have never fought an enemy so utterly “in love with death,” as the terrorists themselves put it, so willing to commit suicide and take the whole earth with them in pursuit of their cause.
All this demands that we take a look at Muslim society to find out what makes it so different. This does not mean we should desist in our efforts to bring democracy to Iraq or end terrorism. But it would be useful to find pressure points that might make our task easier.
What differentiates Islam from the world’s other great religions—Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism—is that it sanctions and practices polygamy. How did this happen?
The consensus among anthropologists is that humanity spent the first 4-5 million years of our evolutionary history living monogamously in small hunting-and-gathering tribes. We know this because the few hunter-gatherers that remain—the Kalahari Bushmen, the Pygmies of Africa, the Australian Aborigines—are all monogamous.
What is so important about monogamy? Its principle advantage is that monogamy guarantees every man an equal chance of having a wife. For small, tightly knit bands of humans surviving in perilous environments, this was crucial for maintaining group loyalty. If a dominant male took more than one wife while others were left with none, dissention would arise and the solidarity of the group would be destroyed.
Polygamy eventually did arise in nearly all parts of the world, however, and anthropologists believe it had to do with growing prosperity. When the first farmers and herders began to accumulate fixed wealth, women began to be bought and sold as wives. The “brideprice”—a payment the wife’s family demands of the husband’s family—is universal in polygamous societies. As the accumulation of wealth grew unevenly, wealthier men took more wives while poorer men were left with none.
Polygamy is still practiced widely in West Africa, where leading men sometimes take as many as 30-50 wives. This leaves a huge residue of unattached men. It is probably the principle reason why so many African countries are beset by “revolutionary armies” living in the bush and raiding rural villages to steal women.
By the fifth century B.C., most of the world’s major religions had been established and had rejected polygamy as part of their social contract. When the Prophet Mohammad founded Islam in the seventh century, however, he inherited the polygamy that was still being practiced by desert herding tribes. Although Mohammed limited each man to four wives and required that he treat them equally, he did not abolish polygamy. That decision has had a tremendous impact on history.
The prohibition against more than four wives was not always honored anyway and the “Sultan’s harem” became a staple of Muslim culture. The counterpoint has been the large populations of unattached warlike men that populate Islamic history.
Islam has a long history of conquest, but it has also been plagued by revolutions from within. Typically a band of unattached men will go into the desert, decide that the faith being practiced by the urban elites is not the “true Islam,” and burst back upon the cities to conquer them—and take their women as well. Jihad has always been the faith of these efforts.
Today polygamy is not practiced widely in Islamic countries, and only accounts for about ten percent of all marriages. The country where the distribution of wives is most unequal—Saudi Arabia—seems to be the best at producing roving jihadists who roam the world in search of conflict.
The absence of a norm of a “man for every woman, a woman for every man” also creates an entirely different male psychology. At one extreme, men consider their own lives to be worthless and expendable because they will not have the chance to reproduce. At the other extreme, they are promised “72 virgins in heaven.” Sometimes the extremes converge.
Polygamy creates dysfunctional societies. Jihad, with its perpetual social unrest, is unlikely to disappear until it is eliminated. I would suggest the United States propose a “right to reproduce” be added to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN would be the perfect place to initiate a global debate.
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18649/article_detail.asp
Polygamy and Terrorism
By William Tucker
After almost four years of dealing with Al Qaeda, jihad, Iraq, and Muslim terrorism, it is obvious that we are up against something we have never encountered before in our history.
We have fought and defeated a Nazi regime that was unprecedented in its cruelty and intent on wiping whole peoples from the earth. We fought and defeated an Imperial Japan and helped turn it into a modern nation. We fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars and saw how the portions of Asia we rescued thrived while those that fell under Communism turned into bleak totalitarian societies.
But we have never fought an enemy so utterly “in love with death,” as the terrorists themselves put it, so willing to commit suicide and take the whole earth with them in pursuit of their cause.
All this demands that we take a look at Muslim society to find out what makes it so different. This does not mean we should desist in our efforts to bring democracy to Iraq or end terrorism. But it would be useful to find pressure points that might make our task easier.
What differentiates Islam from the world’s other great religions—Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism—is that it sanctions and practices polygamy. How did this happen?
The consensus among anthropologists is that humanity spent the first 4-5 million years of our evolutionary history living monogamously in small hunting-and-gathering tribes. We know this because the few hunter-gatherers that remain—the Kalahari Bushmen, the Pygmies of Africa, the Australian Aborigines—are all monogamous.
What is so important about monogamy? Its principle advantage is that monogamy guarantees every man an equal chance of having a wife. For small, tightly knit bands of humans surviving in perilous environments, this was crucial for maintaining group loyalty. If a dominant male took more than one wife while others were left with none, dissention would arise and the solidarity of the group would be destroyed.
Polygamy eventually did arise in nearly all parts of the world, however, and anthropologists believe it had to do with growing prosperity. When the first farmers and herders began to accumulate fixed wealth, women began to be bought and sold as wives. The “brideprice”—a payment the wife’s family demands of the husband’s family—is universal in polygamous societies. As the accumulation of wealth grew unevenly, wealthier men took more wives while poorer men were left with none.
Polygamy is still practiced widely in West Africa, where leading men sometimes take as many as 30-50 wives. This leaves a huge residue of unattached men. It is probably the principle reason why so many African countries are beset by “revolutionary armies” living in the bush and raiding rural villages to steal women.
By the fifth century B.C., most of the world’s major religions had been established and had rejected polygamy as part of their social contract. When the Prophet Mohammad founded Islam in the seventh century, however, he inherited the polygamy that was still being practiced by desert herding tribes. Although Mohammed limited each man to four wives and required that he treat them equally, he did not abolish polygamy. That decision has had a tremendous impact on history.
The prohibition against more than four wives was not always honored anyway and the “Sultan’s harem” became a staple of Muslim culture. The counterpoint has been the large populations of unattached warlike men that populate Islamic history.
Islam has a long history of conquest, but it has also been plagued by revolutions from within. Typically a band of unattached men will go into the desert, decide that the faith being practiced by the urban elites is not the “true Islam,” and burst back upon the cities to conquer them—and take their women as well. Jihad has always been the faith of these efforts.
Today polygamy is not practiced widely in Islamic countries, and only accounts for about ten percent of all marriages. The country where the distribution of wives is most unequal—Saudi Arabia—seems to be the best at producing roving jihadists who roam the world in search of conflict.
The absence of a norm of a “man for every woman, a woman for every man” also creates an entirely different male psychology. At one extreme, men consider their own lives to be worthless and expendable because they will not have the chance to reproduce. At the other extreme, they are promised “72 virgins in heaven.” Sometimes the extremes converge.
Polygamy creates dysfunctional societies. Jihad, with its perpetual social unrest, is unlikely to disappear until it is eliminated. I would suggest the United States propose a “right to reproduce” be added to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN would be the perfect place to initiate a global debate.
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18649/article_detail.asp
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