The facebook group ‘Muslims for Progressive Values’ has just banned me, after I respectfully challenged them on their beliefs that Islam supports secularism, and I challenged them on their condemnation of polygamy in Islam. It’s a funny group, they claim they are ‘Muslims’ and they claim they liberal. But despite their support for ‘freedom’ for consenting adults to do whatever they please (e.g. adultery, gay marriage, mistresses etc), they draw the line at polygamy!! Oh the inconsistency of Liberal ‘Muslims’. Not to mention the fact that they claim to support ‘critical thinking’, yet when someone actually comes to their page to think critically about THEIR beliefs, they react with bigotry and intolerance.
They argued that Muslim women who accept polygamous marriages, have been ‘brainwashed’, and anyone who claims that polygamous marriage is morally acceptable, ‘should be condemned’. This is despite the fact that polygamy is between consenting adults, has reasonable terms and conditions, and was practiced by many Prophets.
Liberals (individualists) may call themselves ‘Liberal’, and believers in ‘freedom’, but these are just euphemisms, or terms they use to sell their ideology (materialistic individualism). No doubt, the Communists believed they were liberating the proletariat (i.e. working classes of the world) with their system, and the Nazi’s believed they were liberators of the German people, and the Zionists believed they are liberators of the jewish people etc every one believes they are ‘liberators’ and ‘free’, however they only mean that they ‘free’ people to follow their specifically dictated way of life – not real freedom. At least Islam only limits is laws to its own adherents who have willingly embraced it. All the other ideologies, historically and currently, imposed their views on others, and dictate the tune everyone should dance to.
Liberals, like the rest of the materialist ideologies mentioned above, only permit what they think it ‘good’ and prohibit what they think it ‘bad’. And the difference between them and others, is merely what set of values they consider good and bad. And anything that subjects ‘individuals’ to non-materialistic power greater than themselves, is something Liberalism detests – and will not tolerate.
The Liberal ‘Muslims’ I encountered are no different. For just because someone believes in God, doesn’t mean they’ll accept His commands, prohibitions and permissions, if it is inconvenient to their own prejudices. Polygamy is detested by Liberals, because of their prejudice against its source – God’s law. They believe that Polygamy is wrong because it can’t be justified by individualism, and so they will be not-so-liberal towards it. And thus their hypocrisy is exposed.
This reminds me of the Liberal opposition to the Niqab and voluntary gender segregation in university lectures (because of religious reasons), yet they are happy with traditional schools with gender segregation (e.g. Eton), segregation in sports, public bathrooms and even Feminist created ‘safe spaces’ for women (not refuges). Liberals decry cultures (rightly) for practicing female genital mutilation, yet they permit labioplasties as part of the services offered at cosmetic surgery clinics, of which 90% of their clients are women!
And why this double standards? Because under the creed of Liberalism, the individual is supreme. And if anything ‘dares’ be greater than the individual, or interfere with the lives of Individuals without justification by reference to materialist Individualism, it will not be tolerated by Liberals. Sadly, this means religion, divine law and God.
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Categories: ARTICLES, Response to Secular Reformation & Modernism, WRITINGS
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Abdullah al Andalusi 
Really are you making equal FMG and the plastic surgery? Let me point you just one difference: There’s not 4 or 5 persons holding a woman to force her to use colagen in their lips or use botox. You must hate women a lot to think cutting the clitoris of a little girl of 6 or 9 years old is the same than an adult woman decide to go under plastic surgery. By the way, I have to assume you think FMG is islamic right? otherwise why you put it as example of what the right Islam propose in comparison to the devianty liberal islam?
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You make a good point about polygyny, but would you then support Polyandry (one woman, several husbands)?
If so, I take my (notional) hat off to you.
If not, then the “liberals” have a point: you are claiming a freedom for men you deny women.
I’ll grant that their condemnation per se is daft, but what they are condemning is “polygamy (they and you mean polygyny in fact) in Islam” and the point is that Islam does not permit the reciprocal arrangement – polyandry.
Therefore, Islam’s position on marriage is inherently biased in favour of men.
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Thanks for the question, may I ask you a question before I answer?
How many pregnancies can a woman have at the same time, and how many pregnancies can a man cause at the same time? In Islam, the man is responsible for his wife – if a woman have four husband’s, which one is the responsible one?
The issue is not about how many protectors there are, but rather the issue is responsibility. Being responsible means that the husband decides the matters affecting the household, provides for his wife, and determines whether his wife can go somewhere or not, due to safety concerns, or family needs. How can four men, responsible for the same woman, all be the head of the household at the same time?
How can four men all request their wife for intimacy when she maybe constantly pregnant! What if one man cannot have children, because his wife is constantly being pregnant with other men’s children! It does not give all the men in that relationship an equal chance of having children, or a number of them. It is both intellectually and intuitively absurd.
a man can impregnate more women, than a woman can be impregnated. Your argument would deny the full sexual potential of males, by having them compete over one womb?
A man with a woman all to himself can have more biological children, than a man having to compete with three other males. Welcome to Sexual dimorphism. Scientists notice that the more dissimilar a male is to females in any species, the greater the propensity to polygamy. You may live in an idealistic ‘egalitarian’ mindset, but humans are not designed by you. I choose realism over airy fairy Western ideological perfectionism.
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Actually, polygamy is in favour of the women and not the men when it is applied correctly, as polygamy provides for widows and also protects the sacred bond of marriage when things just aren’t working out right (such as the wife becomes ill, or she is infertile, or she wants to work but the husband also wants a traditional homemaker, or her husband wants more children but she is satisfied with the number she has, etc).
There are some reasons polygamy has a bad rap amongst Muslims, and both involve accepting modernity as “the answer”:
1) Privileging husband-wife relations over all others, which is absurd. A person is going to naturally be more close to their parents and siblings, as these relationships have formed over years. Likewise, parents will probably be closer with their own children than their own spouses, and this is normal. Yet the Western model of love is based on “finding yourself” in another person, which is nonsense. You find yourself in yourself, and if you need someone else in order to find yourself then you are suffering from horrible self-esteem and/or an inability to look at yourself objectively and accept who you are while striving towards improvement.
2) Women nowadays, in both Western and Muslim societies, see themselves primarily as wives/mothers/sisters/daughters instead of as individuals. I heard a scholar discussing this on iTV South Africa, and he was explaining that if men want successful polygamous marriages then they must encourage their wives to expand their identities outside of wife/mother. (You see that? Even Muslims who have tried to isolate themselves from the West have adopted this myth that women only have worth if they are in a relationship, which is also the plot of just about every romantic comedy coming out of both The West and Bollywood. You complete me, Jerry McGuire!)
3) Because women refuse themselves to tolerate even the topic of polygamy, men find themselves in bad situations where they fall in love with another woman. In an attempt to keep their love halaal, they go into “secret marriages” (which are haraam), and when the wife finds out the people get hysterical and cry out, “This is why we hate polygamy”. They refuse to even admit that what they are angry with isn’t even polygamy but is actually more in line with the Western model of “it’s OK for a man to have a mistress but not a woman”, where women’s chastity is placed above the chastity of men – which is unIslamic.
Honestly, I would be fine with a second wife inshaa Allah. I love my husband, but it would be nice to have the bed to myself every other night, to know that someone else was there to take care of him on days when I am exhausted or in a bad mood or whatever. I feel like it would increase the love between us, and it would also keep me on my toes and stop me from being lazy because I’d no longer be the only woman vying for his attention. My only concern with a second wife would be her attitude towards the whole situation, because unfortunately nowadays many women enter into an already established marriage with the intention of breaking the husband wife up so that she is the only wife.
As far as polyandry is concerned, it’s only been present in a few societies (such as a particular Tibetan culture whose name escapes me). It’s never been as prevalent a reproduction scheme over the course of human history as polygny (for obvious reasons if you’re familiar at all with the theory of evolution). Modern day polyandry looks nothing like the historical versions of polyandry, where a woman was married without her consent to a family of brothers. It wasn’t uncommon for a wife to have a husband as young as the age of 2 in these situations, which has to be awkward – changing your husband’s diapers and then when he’s old enough, sharing your bed with him!
Polyandrous societies also experience larger numbers of women who have no support, by the way, because the natural ratio of man to woman is not 50:50 but more often around 49:51, which doesn’t sound like a big deal until you start to think that on a planet of 6 billion people that means there are over 100,000 more women than men on average (and it’s even worse in places like India and China where female infanticide is still practised).
So no, actually polyandry is against women as it doesn’t provide for all of them and it forces a woman to marry several brothers of various ages at the same time. Polygny actually does provide for women and she is still allowed to choose the husband that she wants to be with.
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And actually, I don’t understand how “modernists” can even support gay marriage on the one hand, screaming that what consenting adults do is their business, yet oppose polygny vehemently because hey, what consenting adults do is their business EXCEPT WHEN WOMEN ARE BRAINWASHED.
/rolls eyes
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Hello Abdullah
There are some contentions i have with your points. First of all you make big sweeping generalizations about Muslims and liberals. You don’t own or define the interpretation of Islam, nobody does. Liberalism is a broad philosophical concept and liberals disagree with each other. Guess what, i am a liberal and i have no problem with polygamy and optional segregation as a whole.
Second you selectively choose facts to support a narrative. For example, if ‘the west’ (you speak like it’s a person) is so concerned about Islam as a rival ideology, why have Muslims been immigrating here without any opposition (except a small percentage of far-right supports) since the 1950s and are and always have been free to practice their religion. The former labour leader even proposed laws against islamaphobia. Muslims all over the world flock to the west despite your claims of the west being at war with Islam. Why would Muslims flock to somewhere that is at war with them? Britain even operates sharia councils for Muslims. You live here and debate and lecture at universities promoting sharia for years and as far as i am aware, the government has not stopped you. Of course with the unfortunate rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric and fear-mongering these are becoming controversial but the point still stands, does that sound like a society at war with Islam?
I have often found people manipulate and selectively choose the actions of governments to support one narrative or another for political gains. There are people who seriously believe Obama (Muslim name hint hint) is secretly a Muslim and the reason why ISIS still exists and Saudi Arabia is an ally is because Western powers are secretly Muslim sympathizers and want Islam to rule, as you can imagine they are far-right Muslims haters. You use Western powers actions to promote a different narrative for political gains (to turn Muslims against western powers and ideas to gain support for the sharia) when in reality politics is not that simple.
Look forward to your response.
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