ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Rights of Women in Islam Part Eleven: Polygyny Monogamy is the most natural form of matrimony. In monogamy the spirit of special exclusiveness exists, that is to say, of individual and particular “having”, which is, of course, different from the feeling of the possession of material things. In monogamy both the wife and the husband consider the sentiments, affections and sexual advantages from the other as his or her own and special to him or her.

The converse of monogamy is polygamy or the shared condition of being a wife or husband. Polygamy, or the shared condition of being a wife or husband, can be envisaged in several forms. Sexual communism One of these forms is that there is no special exclusiveness on either side; no man has an exclusive relationship with any particular woman, and no woman is exclusively tied to any man. This imagined situation is the very one which is known as sexual communism.

This form pre-supposes the rejection of family life. Neither history nor even guesses and theories concerning pre-history give any clue of a time when human beings had absolutely no family life at all and when sexual communism prevailed. The way of life which they call by this name and which they claim existed among some primitive peoples was really a middle stage between an exclusive family system and sexual communism.

It is said that in some tribes several brothers would marry several sisters jointly, or that a group of men from one tribe would jointly marry a group of women from another tribe. In the first volume of The Story of Civilization , Will Durant writes: In a few cases we find “group marriage,” by which a number of men belonging to one group married collectively a number of women belonging to another group.

In Tibet, for example, it was the custom for a group of brothers to marry a group of sisters, and for the two groups to practice sexual communism between them, each of the men cohabiting with each of the women. Caesar reported a similar custom in ancient Britain.

Survivals of it appear in the “levirate,” a custom existing among the early Jews and other ancient peoples, by which a man was obliged to marry his brother’s widow” Plato’s view: According to what can be inferred from Plato’s Republic, and from what historians in general confirm, it seems that he, in his theory of philosopher- kings and king-philosophers, proposed a shared family for this class of citizen.