Egyptian Women's Association Calls for Polygny

02/04/2009| IslamWeb

At a time when the Egyptian women's associations resisted polygny and called for a personal status law to ban it, despite the wide-scale turmoil that was raised in the wake of a popular Egyptian soap opera that presented a positive image of polygny, a journalist by the name of Hayaam Darbak, surprised Egyptian society by establishing a women's association named, 'The Right to Marry'. This organization advocates the necessity of polygny. The rationale is that one wife is simply not enough, and that this approach will greatly contribute towards solving the problem of spinsterhood that has become quite common in the Arab world in general and particularly in Egypt over the past few years. Most Egyptian women have bitterly opposed and criticized this new group, while the men strongly support it. Hayaam, the journalist, said,

 

First of all, I do not recognize the women's rights that were given recently and I believe that they are all fabricated. Woman gained her rights fully fourteen centuries ago, since the advent of Islam in Egypt and the Arab region. Second, is it a crime to marry two, or three or four wives with fair treatment between them, or is the real crime letting girls be prey to spinsterhood and overburdening young men with excessive marriage expenses? Thus, I see that polygamy is an obligation that no longer exists due to the selfishness of Arab women in general to the extent that they have prohibited the Sharee‘ah of Allah through creating problems and demanding divorce - a matter that fetters the husband out of fear of disintegrating the family. Unless Allah The Almighty knew that men would need more than one wife, He would not have made it permissible for them or have given them permission to marry four women on one condition that the man could fulfill, namely, justice.

Responding to the feminist turmoil that was staged against the ideas of this association, Darbak said that this turmoil did not drive her to change her stance; instead, it proved that some women are selfish. Thus, she calls all women not to bury their heads in the sand like an ostrich. That is because the phenomenon clearly exists, and, sorrowfully, some women tolerate their husbands having secret relationships with other women, but they refuse to let them marry another woman. Meanwhile, it is in the interest of the wife to help her husband marry when she feels that he wants to marry another woman, instead of having a secret relationship. Hayaam Darbak stressed that many girls want to join her group, and this surprises her, because they all have a high level of awareness and education. Also, many girls are calling her for further information about the group and its activities, and there are members from other Arab counties who have joined the group, whose number has reached more than seventy women so far.

She says that if it was not for her being busy with her job as a journalist, the number of those women would have been multiplied and the idea would have been more widespread throughout all the Arab countries. Speaking of the men's role in this group and the conditions of membership, she said that they all accept the idea, because it fulfills what they want. However, membership is available for girls and women only.