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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.
Uhmmm, I think they did, actually.
judaism permitted polygamy. the article does not mention that. polygamy was widespread in china, japan, among the native peoples in the western hemisphere, classical greece, polynesia, australian aboriginal peoples, and africa well into historical times. in contrast, monogamy in the western world did not come into practice until classical roman times. a literal interpretation of the bible (old and new testaments) reveals to an honest and impartial reader that nothing in the bible forbids polygamy. the contemporary christian view that jesus forbids polygamy did not gain acceptance until christian teachings were modified and adapted to become more attractive to middle class romans.
the article is interesting, but woefully incomplete in its presentation of data and analysis, and i do not sense any correlation, nor any honest attempt to present a case for any such correlation. this is not to say the writer is being deceptive so much as to say that the writer never rises significantly beyond his peers to a level needed to convince me of the premise. ymmv.
I came up with the same conclusion years ago.
How are the women in those countries “excess”? It’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Seems like a recipe for serious regional instability.
Polygamy is one reason Muslims are violent. Young male children getting their butts buggered by horny Muslim adults is another. Being completely controlled by a militant religion that rewards violence is yet another. There is really no reason for Muslims not to be violent. It is the Islamic nature.
It’s pretty common in Saudi. But interestingly one of the major problems is daughters who don’t marry. They are stuck in their dad’s household and with nothing to do. So they get depressed and neurotic.
Indonesia Sex ratio
http://www.indexmundi.com/indonesia/sex_ratio.html
Cambodia - Population - Sex ratio of the total population
http://knoema.com/atlas/Cambodia/topics/Demographics/Population/Sex-ratio
Philippines Sex ratio
http://www.indexmundi.com/philippines/sex_ratio.html
Hey, if you have to put up with more than one woman, or if you can’t get one at all because wealthier guys have all got four apiece tied up, I guess you might tend to get a little bit violent.
‘Splains the whole Islam thing!
Does polygamy also explain the Mountain Meadows masacre?
We have ‘serial polygamy’ in Hollywood.
Mormons were often on the receiving end of violent persecution before 1845, culminating in the battle of Nauvoo (Ill.) in 1844, eventually forcing the Mormons to flee to Utah. I am not promoting Mormonism but I do think people have a right to live as they please, especially after being forced to leave their homes at gunpoint. Finally, anti-polygamist sentiment was taken advantage of to gain followers for political gain during the formation of the Republican Party. Before placing exclusive blame on Mormons in Utah for violence, one question that seems relevant is to ask what is the proximate cause of the Mormons to be living in Utah in the first place.
I am all for people who get sexually and emotionally uptight about what other consenting adults do behind closed doors to voice their (sexually and emotionally uptight) opinions. The point at which the sexually and emotionally uptight people start to advocate or condone violence against some folks merely because those folks do not share their sexually and emotionally uptight views on what consenting adults choose to do in private is the height of irrationality and the point where i depart from them. For sexually and emotionally uptight people with violent intentions everywhere, the cliched adage “make love, not war” is IMHO still appropriate. And yet another adage is that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Did you ever read “A Study in Scarlet”, the first Sherlock Holmes story? He’s not actually in it very much, it’s a long recounting of some man’s misadventures among the early Mormons. I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember thinking: woah, this isn’t the Donnie & Marie Mormons we’ve come to know and love.
Of course it is a made up story, but clearly things have changed with that group.
It might be interesting to study how much getting rid of polygamy had to do with that, if anything.
And she’s another who got fired by NRO for that exact piece.
The mainland Chinese are some of the most race-conscious people on the planet, which is why that isn’t happening anytime soon. Maybe as prostitutes, but not wives.
HA HA, those are pretty funny.
Inbreeding is more likely.
Goggle “Muslim inbreeding”. In Pakistan the population is 70% the product of cousin-marriage. Inbreeding over fourteen centuries has produced hideous results.
Combine inbreeding with polygamy and the aforementioned “bachelor herd” becomes an inexhaustible source of jihad fodder.
Good post, you answered a lot of questions that I had but I didn’t want to beleaguer others by asking.
Quite frankly, if it weren’t for the “angry man” problem I think polygamy probably works well. Men like sex more than women, women like to hang out together more than men, more hands to raise the kids, etc.
Think of the end of Dr. Strangelove, where the one old duffer proposes taking prominent men (himself and his friends) to live in the post-nuke bunkers with many beautiful women in order to maintain the human race. Of course these old farts will have to hook up with many women each, that’s the sacrifice they’ll have to make for mankind.
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