PAKISTAN: Polygamy Reviewed

“Marry such women as seem good to you, two, three or four,” the Holy Koran exhorts the faithful, “but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one, or what your right hands own, so it is likelier you will not be partial.” Through 13 centuries, Moslem males have enjoyed polygamy and insisted that they have avoided partiality. But the truth is quite otherwise, to hear the 20,000 members of the All-Pakistan Women’s Association tell it. “If any man is honest with himself and understands human nature,” argued one passionate Pakistani feminist, “he will realize that he cannot treat four wives equally.”

The feminists found something to focus their anger on last April, when then Prime Minister Mohammed Ali* made his pretty young social secretary his second wife. In response to the outcry, the government assigned an advisory Commission on Marriage and Family Laws (four men and three women) to chart out the dangerous ground between the feminists and the powerful polygamy lobby—Moslem mullahs who seek a theocratic state, and would, according to their critics, confine Pakistan to a 9th-century Arab feudal pattern.

The commission sent out thousands of questionnaires in Urdu, English and Bengali, last week reported six to one for reform. Henceforth, it recommended, Pakistani males should get permission for second marriages from special new courts of matrimony; they should prove themselves able to support two families; they should not marry again “merely … to marry a prettier or younger woman.” The commission added that child marriages and the sale of brides should be outlawed, and that women and men should have equal rights of divorce. As of now, Pakistanis can divorce their wives in Islamic fashion by saying “I divorce thee” three times in their presence.

“Polygamy,” said the commission, “is prompted by the lower self of men who are devoid of refined sentiments.” Anticipating objections from the mullahs, the commission insisted that it was not amending the Koran—only reading it right. The commission then went on to grapple with the touchy and important problem of reconciling progress with religion in a nation whose principal basis for being was its Moslem faith. The commission appealed to the right of ijtihad, or exercise of individual judgment within the broad framework of the revealed word. Moslem law, said the commission, holds that in the Koran “what is not definitely prohibited is permissible,” and the failure of Moslems to exercise this right of individual judgment is the reason for the “universal backwardness” of the Moslem peoples in the past three centuries. “No nation can stand aside as an idle or wondering onlooker while the world progresses rapidly.”

*Now Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., and not to be confused with the present Prime Minister, whose name is Mohamad Ali.