Cultural Sensitivity in the Negev

In the pages of Israel’s law book, and more precisely in the Criminal Code S176, I discovered the sanction imposed for having multiple wives. Yes, this is a criminal violation! The sanction determined in law is five years of imprisonment. I asked myself how it could be possible that there exists an explicit law in the matter of multiple wives, yet simultaneously there is an increasing number of men married to more than one woman in the Negev. The percentage of multiple wives in the Negev reaches approximately 30%.

Even though criminal law applies to Muslims, these marriages are considered valid under the Sharia, and there are several ways to bypass the criminal sanction in cooperation with the Sharia court.

Verse 3 of Surah 4 (women) in the Quran determines: “…Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice.” From here we see that a Muslim is permitted to marry more than one woman, on the condition that he treat them equally and proportionally.

The source of marriage to more than one woman lies in the tribal structure of ancient Arab society, in which multiple male children were a value symbolizing strength, power and status. Although having multiple wives was adopted by Islam through the Quran, it remains conditional on the justice exhibited by the man toward the woman. In order to avoid the legally mandated sanction, men adopted the concept of ‘common law marriage” for the second and third woman, even though from a Sharia perspective these wives are considered legal. One creative way to bypass the law is to create a marriage contract which does not meet all of the conditions for marriage according  to Muslim law.

Another method involves “fictitious divorce,” i.e. to divorce the first wife, marry the second and then annul the divorce of the first wife. For three months following divorce the woman is in a waiting period, during which , husband can annul the divorce with no need for a new wedding contract. Annulling the divorce does not require consent of the wife, and can be done by a declaration that the divorce is annulled. As the first divorce is annulled, the woman is “daughter of the return”.

A third method is to marry in the Palestinian Authority, and then to request a marriage permit in Israel.

Marriage to a second and third wife is not foreign to the Negev desert. In my work I have daily encounters with women taken as second or third wives. This occurs in all social classes within Bedouin society. In recent years this phenomenon has also spread to the “educated” within Bedouin society: school principals, teachers, local leaders, etc. There are even educated women who choose to marry married men, and in certain cases even prefer married men.

Bigamy represents the negative use of the Islamic religion by people who claim to be religious. The justification is that “this is permitted to me according to religion.” Although in numerous cases the man involved is not religious, in order to marry a second woman he will become religious overnight. Men encourage each other to marry an additional woman, and in numerous cases the man is pressured and his manliness is challenged should he refuse to do so.

The participation of women in this practice of “selecting the intended bride” reminds me of the phenomenon of trafficking in women, although here the trafficking in women is institutionalized and accepted, and no one challenges it. It is not called trafficking, and religious justifications are utilised to do it.

Those primarily harmed are the women and children. Women find themselves helpless when the husband intends to marry another woman. As the other woman is legitimate and accepted, not only will they not gain support if they object to this, but they are liable to find themselves divorced, which for them would be more serious than the second marriage due to the stigma attached to a divorced woman. A woman told me once “I prefer that he will marry an additional woman rather than divorce me; at least I will have an address. I will have a husband.” In numerous cases the men abandon their first wives, who are then considered to be only formally married.  With this, as they are registered in the household of the man, their requests to be recognized as single mothers will not be accepted. These women thus remain economically dependent on the men who abandoned them. If they leave the common household they are liable to also lose the children.

The children born to polygamous families live in confusion and are torn between several worlds – between two families in the best case and four family frameworks in the worst. It is clear that when they grow up, they imitate this reality.

It is interesting, therefore, that the state legislates a law it does not intend to enforce, at least not on everyone. For this the state hides behind a veil of  “cultural sensitivity” that it suddenly adopts. This double standard leaves women with no address and no assistance, both as part of the minority within a patriarchal society which perceives oppression such as this as legitimate and even encourages it in interpretations intended to serve its goals, also as citizens whose rights should be defended. Hypocritically, the sole context in which criticism of multiple wives is heard is not concerning the violations of women’s rights, but as a demographic threat which concerns the state, and which perceives woman as womb. In cases in which the state bothers to enforce the law, ridiculously short sentences are imposed, often transformed into community work or a tiny financial penalty. This is part of the forgiving attitude toward crimes against women, particularly when the women are Arab women.

Attorney Rawia Aburabiya is Israel's premier expert on polygamy in Negev Bedouin society, having completed her master's thesis, "Redefining Polygamy among the Palestinian Bedouins in Israel: Colonialism, Patriarchy and Resistance", on the issue.

This article first appeared in Mitsad Sheni, the Hebrew language periodical of the Alternative Information Center (AIC). Translated to English by the AIC.