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Is polygamy the cause of Muslim violence?
Human Events ^ | February 18, 2014 | William Tucker

Posted on 02/23/2014 1:15:33 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

Syria is submerged in civil war. The Sunni and the Shi’ia of Iraq are renewing their 1300-year-old conflict. Libyan rebels have shut down the nation’s oil industry. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has been suppressed and is resorting to terrorism. Pakistan is a cauldron of violence and assassinations. In short, the Muslim world, as usual, is at war with itself.

This is not a contemporary phenomenon. Islam has been attacking its neighbors ever since the Prophet Mohammed received the Koran from the Angel Gabriel in the 7th century. Within 50 years of his death, Muslim armies had conquered the known world from Spain to Afghanistan. The Moguls invaded India, setting off a conflict that persists today. The Ottoman Empire besieged Europe for hundreds of years before its collapse in the 20th century. As historian Samuel Huntington has written, Islam has always had “bloody borders.”

Is there any explanation for this? Is it temperament or history? Is it the inevitable fight over scarce resources? Or, as Muslim cultures would insist, is it because Islam has always been surrounded by hostile neighbors?

In my book, Marriage and Civilization, I offer a novel explanation as to why Islam has always been at war with itself and others. It is because Islam it is the only major religious culture that embraces polygamy.

Polygamy? What does that have to do with anything? Am I suggesting that because some minor sheik outside Baghdad takes two wives, two young Muslim brothers in Massachusetts feel compelled to blow up the Boston Marathon?

Well, yes. In any human society there are approximately the same number of men and women. Under monogamy, which limits each man to one wife, everyone gets a fair chance to marry. When powerful and successful men are allowed to take more than one wife, however, as they are in a polygamous society, this creates a pool of unsuccessful men at the bottom of society who are constantly in conflict with the system.

The history of Islam has been one continuous story of rebel groups off in the desert and deciding that the religion being practiced by the authorities and their harems back in the cities is not the “true Islam.” They come crashing back upon the palaces, overthrowing the leaders (no Ottoman Sultan ever died of natural causes) and establishing a new regime that is just like the old one, where powerful are allowed to take multiple wives.

The Prophet Muhammad had a novel solution to this problem. Go and conquer neighboring societies and requisition their women. If you die in the process, the reward will be even greater – 72 virgins waiting for you in heaven! “Jihad” has been a clever and effective way of redirecting the hostilities of the “bachelor herd” that polygamy inevitably produces.

The fruits of polygamy are visible all over the Middle East. Because women are always in short supply, families can charge a “bride price” to any man who wants to marry their daughter. Because daughters are now worth money, they must be veiled and sequestered so they don’t run off with some callow youth. Older men desperate for wives push down into younger and younger cohorts of the population. Marriages between 35-year-old men and 13-year-old girls become common. (Muhammad’s last wife was age six.)

But the main product of polygamy is a population of angry young men who are ripe recruits for terrorism. The Koran supposedly limits a man to four wives but in countries where there are vast disparities of wealth this is routinely violated. Osama bin Laden’s father, a successful Saudi businessman, had 22 wives and 54 children. The unbalance between unmarried men and the available women in Saudi Arabia is the highest in the world. Is it any wonder that 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudi nationals?

Ann Coulter once suggested that we would cure Muslim violence by converting the Islamic world to Christianity. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Christianity’s long enforcement of monogamous marriage has obviously played a critical role in establishing the more peaceful civilization of the West. The same can be said for China and India, where the vast majority adhere to monogamy. None of these cultures is plagued with the endless internal violence and outward aggression of Islam.

Converting the Muslim world to Christianity may be out of the question, but persuading it to give up polygamy on the grounds that it creates an inherently unstable society is a task that the rest of the world might be willing to undertake.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: globaljihad; islam; marriage; muslimworld; polygamy; polygyny
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Good luck! Heck, we're headed towards polygamy here!
1 posted on 02/23/2014 1:15:33 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Is polygamy the cause of Muslim violence?

The KORAN and the example set by their prophet are the causes of Muslim violence

2 posted on 02/23/2014 1:20:52 PM PST by 2banana (My common ground with terrorists - they want to die for islam and we want to kill them)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

All the savage civilizations do it:)


3 posted on 02/23/2014 1:21:55 PM PST by Beowulf9
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Muslims are the cause of Muslim violence.


4 posted on 02/23/2014 1:22:49 PM PST by rickmichaels
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To: 2banana

all this fasting is.


5 posted on 02/23/2014 1:23:13 PM PST by Perdogg (Ted Cruz-Rand Paul 2016)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Women tend to civilize men, especially in a culture that recognizes and encourages monogamous marriage. Whenever there is an imbalance, the culture becomes more unstable. Expect China to rear it’s head as this new generation takes over.


6 posted on 02/23/2014 1:26:31 PM PST by keats5 (Not all of us are hypnotized.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I know that polygamy is premitted by Islam, but I wonder how prevalent it really is. Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberge could probably each have 22 wives but that wouldn’t impact the broader society.

But the basic problem (not enough brides for all the brothers) is likely to get worse as sex selection abortions continue in China and now India and possibly even among these ethnic groups in the west.

And when you actually don’t have an equal number of women and men monogamy won’t help.

You’d need women to take multiple husbands and I just don’t see that working out in any but isolated, eccentric, cases.


7 posted on 02/23/2014 1:27:45 PM PST by jocon307
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
When a rich man can have many wives and concubines, kept locked in his house as virtual slaves until they die, where does that leave the rest of men?

Angrytown, that's where. So they need a "religion" that directs their anger and frustration outward at infidels, instead of inward at their "betters" who have cornered the market on girls and women.


8 posted on 02/23/2014 1:29:02 PM PST by Travis McGee (www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet; Elsie

well polygamy is the major part of the Mormon religion (first principle) and Utah Territory was probably one of the most violent area in North America 1845-1877 for white on white crime during Brigham Young’s reign of terror.....


9 posted on 02/23/2014 1:29:06 PM PST by Tennessee Nana
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To: 2banana
Yep!!

Pedophilia,
Sodomy,
Polygamy,
Murder,
Assault,
Theft......

10 posted on 02/23/2014 1:29:06 PM PST by SandRat (Duty - Honor - Country! What else needs said?)
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To: keats5
There are millions of “excess” North Korean, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Filipino, Polynesian Thai and Indonesian women who could marry all those Chinese men without prospective mates. I'm surprised the Chinese haven't figured that out.
11 posted on 02/23/2014 1:30:09 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (I will raise $2M for Sarah Palin's next run, what will you do?)
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To: 2banana

That’s right. It is truly a huge satanic cult...masquerading as a true religion.


12 posted on 02/23/2014 1:31:10 PM PST by fabian (" And a new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forests will echo in laughter")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Image and video hosting by TinyPic
13 posted on 02/23/2014 1:32:14 PM PST by b4its2late (A Progressive is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I bet they couldn’t even tell you why.


14 posted on 02/23/2014 1:33:51 PM PST by RIghtwardHo
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Muslim men marry their eight year old first cousins who then start producing children at age eleven.

What could possibly go wrong such a Gene Pool?


15 posted on 02/23/2014 1:34:59 PM PST by DJ Taylor (Once again our country is at war, and once again the Democrats have sided with our enemy.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

....”the Muslim world, as usual, is at war with itself”....

Well, as if that’s news. Truly if they aren’t fighting another they most definatley go after each other. And it hasn’t nothing to do with anything but the Islamic law and those who give it to the people as each determines.

It’s a hateful, death cult and that’s all there is to know. You cannot “restore” it for it was and always will be just what it is.

No matter what you take away from Islam it will remain a death cult.


16 posted on 02/23/2014 1:35:34 PM PST by caww
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Inbreeding is bad, mmkay?


17 posted on 02/23/2014 1:37:26 PM PST by RichInOC ("In the name of Allah, The Inexorable, The Irresistible...")
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To: Travis McGee


18 posted on 02/23/2014 1:38:32 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (I will raise $2M for Sarah Palin's next run, what will you do?)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Mormons did practice polygamy and they never blew up people and things...

Article is pretty lame logic...

19 posted on 02/23/2014 1:40:56 PM PST by Popman ("Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God" - Thomas Jefferson)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
I always figured that any guy who went polygamous probably got what he deserved (Hell on earth...) but anyway, we also have this... “Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.” ― G.K. Chesterton
20 posted on 02/23/2014 1:42:33 PM PST by faithhopecharity (" uri)
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