More on Islam (written Sept 14)

I had another interesting conversation with a colleague yesterday and I wanted to share a few of the highlights:

My colleague brought up the Florida pastor threatening to burn the Koran in commemoration of 9/11. I quickly started talking about how every country has its crazy people and emphasized that the insensitive and irrational actions of one man should not by any means be taken to represent the general attitude of our country. My colleague said he understood that, and that in fact the imam at his mosque had actually said something very similar regarding the issue. Very good to hear! My colleague also said that a very large majority of Muslims in the world do not support violent actions by extremists, and he hopes that Americans understand that. I said that some do, but not all.

A little while later, the conversation moved on to polygamy, which is the norm here, and I believe in most Muslim countries. He explained that Allah says that women should be taken care of by men, and that is one of his gifts to women. I asked why, exactly women need taking care of, and he said that Allah decreed it, so we don't question it. A more satisfying answer would have been that women also are supposed to have a lot of children, which means they are busy with child-rearing and therefore generally don't have time to work outside the home, which means they need a husband to support them financially. That certainly is how things work here. So women need husbands, and he rightly pointed out that there are more women than men in the population (not a huge number more, but there are more), so it follows that in order for men to carry out their duty of taking care of women, some of them need to have more than one wife. Interesting perspective.

From there, my colleague went on to ask me why it is illegal in the US to have more than one wife (something that is genuinely shocking to many Gambians). I said that the only reason that Gambians are allowed to have more than one wife is because the Koran says so. As I was saying that, however, I started to wonder...why am I considering monogamy the assumed starting point that must be modified for anything different to be acceptable? I would assume that it's because the US was founded by Christians, most of whom believe in monogamy, but the US today is not nearly as homogeneously Christian as it was in the late 1700s, and yet the law still stands. My colleague, aware that there are Muslims in America, asked why the US Government has laws about an issue on which different religions differ so radically. Shouldn't it be something that people can make their own decision about based on their religious beliefs? Hmmm...good question. Back to the ever-controversial debate about the separation of church and state...