Polygamy and the Obedient Wives Club (OWC)

I came across this e-mail recently, and thought it worth sharing. It publicises an Islamic talk on polygamy, to be held in West London today. It’s a raw expression of attitudes within quite traditional societies – pretty hilarious and somewhat cringe-worthy too. As the saying goes, you can’t make this shit up. Enjoy!

CAN THE OBEDIENT WIVES CLUB (OWC) - aka THE POLYGAMY CLUB WORK IN THE UK?

A debate and discussion with Brother M Ali and both his wives [Founding members of the Global Ikhwan Polygamy Club]

Date: Wednesday 23rd November 2011

Time: 6.30 pm – 8.00 pm

Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

In July this year, Global Ikhwan, a group based in Malaysia launched, with great controversy, the "Obedient Wives Club (OWC)", with admirable intentions to curb various social ills, including prostitution and gambling, by showing Muslim wives how to "be submissive and keep their spouses happy in the bedroom". The understanding is that this, in turn, would lead to more harmonious marriages and societies.

"In Islam, if the husband wants sex and the wife is not in the mood, she has to give in to him. If not, the angels will curse her. This is not good for the family." (Mrs Dr Darlan Zaini, literature professor and co-founder of OWC)

"If we provide our husbands [with] more than a prostitute can give, then he will not go out looking for it. Men are by nature polygamous, we hear of many men having the ‘other woman,’ affairs and prostitution because for men, one woman is not enough. Polygamy is a way to overcome social ills such as this.” (Dr Rohaya Mohamad, medical doctor and 3rd wife of Mohamad Ikram Ashaari)

Global branches have now opened in Australia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Indonesia and now London. With a huge "Muslim spinster" crisis, and increasingly large numbers of divorced women with children, could this be a solution for women in the UK and help stop Muslim men ordering their "mail order brides" from the Muslim world as well as curb their secret weekend retreats, made easy thanks to EasyJet and Ryanair?

Apparently, the above Dr Rohaya Mohamad also declared that by becoming a “good whore …to your husband” and serving him “better than a first-class prostitute”, women could help "curb social ills like prostitution, domestic violence, human trafficking and abandoned babies" – all of which she attributed to unfulfilled sexual needs. – see the Guardian.

Weird things are happening in Malaysia and the Far East – first the cult of the Islamic Gold Dinar (to replace the imperialist invention that is paper currency) and now this. These champions of polygamy appear to have also published a book entitled “Islamic Sex: Fighting Jews to Return Islamic Sex to the World.” Now, I know that Jews are very good at business and moneylending, but sex as well! For those not familiar, an imagined Jewish threat is pretty much an article of faith among zealously orthodox Muslims. It’s in the history and in the present of course. In the comedy film, Four Lions, a car breakdown was blamed on a conspiracy of ‘Jewish spark plugs’! Naturally also, some Muslims and many Islamic organisations want to ‘Islamize’ everything (by their own admission). From Islamic banks and mortgages to Islamic environmentalism and Islamic ethics, Islamic social sciences, the “Islamization of knowledge” programme in the US, Islamic holidays, and now Islamic sex, we have it all.

The subject of polygamy seems to have headlined in the Arab Spring too. Back in October, in a set-piece speech and with the world’s media looking on, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, head of the interim government in Libya, said a strange thing. He declared that polygamy would be allowed, as per the Sharia, and that existing restrictions on it would be lifted. Quite why this was so important to him remains a mystery. His intention may have been to appease the small but vocal Islamists – in which case it reminds us (as in Pakistan) that this is what matters most to the religious establishment. Not democracy or freedom, for these are man-made concepts, but polygamy, triple talaq (divorce), stoning women, etc.

Lessons from the Arab Spring: Egypt

Almost a year on since the Arab Spring began with Tunisia in December 2010 it appears to be kinda fizzling out now. (…those dreaded words that no one wants to say). Sadly, while great changes are afoot in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen look to have survived, for the moment. The latter group are far from stable of course, and sooner or later another wave of uprisings will occur for sure, if not next year then sometime in the next decade perhaps. And while it doesn’t sound very exciting to speak of decades, unfortunately that’s how long it takes. Historically, momentous changes are measured in epochs and generations, not months. So anyway, this moment seems as good as any, to round up my musings over the last year and summarise a couple of important lessons, starting with this posting on Egypt.

Lesson 1 says that please, please, please, can we finally drop this notion that America and the Western powers install and maintain dictators in the Middle East. The fact is that America, as the largest power ever known to man, has next to no influence or leverage. We saw this during the Egyptian uprising where American rhetoric followed (i.e. was led by) what was happening in the streets in Cairo and Alexandria. The Egyptian people themselves made it happen, which I’m sure we can all agree on, except for the most habitual of conspiracy theorists. The bit that people find harder to accept, however, is that the prior stability of the regime was also down to the Egyptian people – that they didn’t sufficiently want change or weren’t sufficiently capable of demanding it. It should be obvious, if one just thinks about it, that the political and cultural climate in any country is a reflection primarily of the economic structures of that society, not of outside forces. Mubarak had power because the Egyptian people were relatively weak. And while the West does business with whoever is in power, that isn’t the same as saying the West is primarily responsible for propping them up. It is worth remembering that despotic regimes ruled unequal societies of the Middle East (as everywhere else in the world) for centuries and millennia, well before the West was around to supply them with guns and money.

Lesson 2 is that economic freedom, or in other words free-market economics, is a necessary condition for real (or sustainable) revolutions – notwithstanding the tendency to associate revolutions with socialism or Marxism. European history demonstrates that successive changes in the social and political order went hand-in-hand with a bottom up economic empowerment of the lower classes – note the rise of the merchant class or middle classes. In Egypt then, it wasn’t so much the grinding poverty of the masses, but the disenfranchised yet capable, well-to-do that were a key ingredient in a successful uprising. Whereas decades of violent opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood had failed miserably, what we saw in 2011 was a rather more enlightened group of revolutionaries who knew how to get both the local population and the international community on side, and indeed how to annoy the hell out of a dictator and then make him look feeble. Mubarak’s mistake was to have let this group of well-to-do Egyptians prosper without fully co-opting them into the state machinery, whereas previous Egyptian rulers over the centuries had been adept at nullifying any emergent independently wealthy class. Yet, it wasn’t Mubarak’s dong either. In a sense, relentless trade and globalisation over many decades was dragging Egypt and its masses, as in almost every country in the world, ever so gradually, until at some stage a political awakening of the masses just had to come about.

Still, the scourge of collectivism remains. What we have now is an incremental and rather unsatisfactory rate of reform (with much disillusionment in Egypt as I write), and this is really not surprising at all, for the economic power balances and the cultural make-up of Egypt have barely shifted. As such, they do not warrant a real revolution. The military has always been the real obstacle rather than Mubarak himself, and the reason for this is their owning much of the country’s resources. Vast tracts of agricultural land, leading industrial and manufacturing plants, construction companies, Red Sea resorts, are all owned by the military top brass – which is by far the largest economic power base and dubbed as an ‘economy within an economy’. These guys might grudgingly allow elections, but real capitalistic free-market competition? Don’t think so. Then we have the Muslim Brotherhood, ostensibly pro-market right now, though I suspect only because they are the economic outsiders at present, while ultimately a centralising ideology lurks in their psyche. Finally, we have the secularists, be they political figures or grass roots revolutionaries, who largely subscribe to socialist ideas. These are the people who see great benefit in nationalised industries (a sure path to corruption, centralised power and yet another dictatorship), minimum wages, price controls/subsidies and generally supporting the dependent classes (as opposed to empowering them), and they see no great problem in a bunch of elites drafting a new constitution.

Basically, a libertarian culture hasn't really taken hold in Egypt, and so the counter forces of centralisation threaten to make this a one-time-only revolution, as we’ve seen in Communist and socialist experiments elsewhere (not least in the post-colonial Middle East and North Africa). As Friedrich Hayek observed of 20^th century Europe (The Road to Serfdom), it is rather strange that so many people think they can have political freedom without economic freedom.