(Map shows where polygamy is legal worldwide.  Light blue states permit it by law.  Dark blue states do not criminalize it, though it is not legally supported.  Green states make it legal only for Muslims.  Black states forbid it through criminal law.)

The founder and President of Italy’s Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations wrote this week that Italian law must be changed to support the practice of Islamic polygamous marriage.  “When it comes to civil rights here, then polygamy is a civil right. Muslims do not agree with homosexual partnerships, and yet they have to accept a system that allows it,” president Hamza Piccardo wrote.  “There is no reason why Italy should not accept polygamous marriages of consenting persons.”

The reaction from Italian officials has so far rejected this suggestion.  However, in the wake of a substantial alteration of the nature of the matrimonial union as a matter of law, it is not clear whether this rejection can stand up.  Polygamy, especially in Islam, has a legitimate claim to being a much less radical change to the institution of marriage than that of “homosexual partnerships.”  It has been consistently practiced in at least some parts of the world throughout the period of Islam’s history.  It is also a form of marriage that supports the organic unions that give rise to children, which in theological accounts of marriage — accounts not limited to Islam, but also well-known in Judaism and Christianity — is the real purpose of the institution of marriage to begin with.  The arguments deployed against gay marriage by its opponents will not serve as arguments against polygamy, and those arguments were rejected by the courts in any case.

John Witte, Jr., writing in the Emory Law Review, argues that there are wide range of alternative legal arguments available to opponents of polygamy.  Because they are broadly founded on a number of different strategies, he thinks they could be sustained against legal challenges today.

The historical sources commended monogamy on various grounds. ⁸ The most common argument was that exclusive and enduring monogamous marriages were the best way to ensure paternal certainty and joint parental investment in children, who are born vulnerable and utterly dependent on their parents’ mutual care and remain so for many years. Monogamous marriages, furthermore, were the best way to ensure that men and women were treated with equal dignity and respect within the domestic sphere and that husbands and wives, and parents and children provided each other with mutual support, protection, and edification throughout their lifetimes, adjusted to each person’s needs at different stages in the life cycle. This latter logic now applies to same sex couples, too, who have gained increasing rights in the West in recent years, including the rights to marry, adopt, and parent in some places.

The historical sources condemned polygamy on a number of grounds. The most common argument was that polygamy was unnatural, unfair, and unjust to wives and children—a violation of their fundamental rights in modern parlance. ⁹ Polygamy, moreover, was also too often the cause, corollary, or consequence of sundry other harms, crimes, and abuses. ¹⁰ And polygamy, according to some more recent writers, was a threat to good citizenship, social order, and political stability, even an impediment to the advancement of civilizations toward liberty, equality, and democratic government. ¹¹ For nearly two millennia, the West has thus declared polygamy to be a crime and has had little patience with various arguments raised in its defense.

Indeed, a sketch of those arguments has already appeared in the Italian debate.  Debora Serracchiani, deputy chairman of Italy’s Democratic Party, said: “Centuries of fighting for women’s rights can not simply be brushed aside…. Polygamy has nothing to do with civil rights.”  The implication is that polygamy would be harmful to women’s rights and to their equality.

But Piccardo, whose group is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, argues that introducing polygamy is itself a matter of what he calls “equality of citizens before the law.”  If Muslims are going to be forced to accept a secular union that their religion finds abhorrent, he claims, everyone else should accept Muslims’ living according to their traditional norms as well.  The right to alter the institution of marriage to suit one’s community is the ground of equality for him, rather than the question of whether men and women are treated precisely the same by the legal forms of marriage.

Islam also has a standing response to the charge that polygamy introduces unfairness to wives or children.  As Mohamad Abdun Nasir argued recently in the Al Jamiah Journal of Islamic Studies, the 13th century Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya discussed polygamy at great length in his writings on marriage fatwas.  “Ibn Taymiyya tended not to view the practice of polygamy as a wrongdoing although it might lead to some negative excess in concern of its practice in Muslim society,” Nasir writes.  “[I]n spite of some problems that might occur, such as injustice to women, neglecting or deserting to the wives, he does not invalidate the marriage as long as the husband can assure the fairness in distributing material supports.”  Indeed, Nasir argues, Taymiyya prefers polygamy as a solution to marital crises to divorce — itself perfectly lawful under Islamic law, but which Taymiyya found to be far more unjust to wives than polygamy.

This debate has only just begun in Italy, but it is one we can expect to see more widely over the coming years.  Just as gay rights advocates demanded acceptance of their form of marriage as a means of insisting upon the dignity of their way of life, so too are Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups likely to insist that the dignity of Islam requires accepting its forms of life.  Whether or not the legal arguments against polygamy will hold up against their arguments, and the social pressures they can bring to bear, remains to be seen.