I have heard reports from people who have lived in Libya under Qaddafi who say that the standard of living under him was low, despite the country’s huge oil wealth: that people went for weeks without being paid, that shops were empty and that people had to fight when supplies did come in, and that he decreed that anyone who lived in a house owned it, enabling houses to be simply seized by their tenants and the real owner losing everything as a result. Although people claim he established a health system, the standard of care was very poor, nurses were abusive, people got misdiagnosed and women died in childbirth regularly, and the conditions of the hospitals were filthy inside. Qaddafi also lavished money on foreign dignitaries and enterprises while people at home suffered delayed pay, poor healthcare and poor general law enforcement (such as traffic law).

However, worst of all was the repression — the widespread spying and phone-tapping, the mass arrests in which people were held for years without trial, the torture; and even those who lived in exile were at risk from assassination by Qaddafi’s hit squads. I just watched a Panorama which gives details of a massacre in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, prompted by an attempted break-out by a group of (it appears political) inmates, mass arrests, torture presided over by security chief Musa Qusa, who had been in close contact with the British security service MI6, and renditions (kidnappings) of Libyan exiles from far eastern countries with the collaboration of the British security forces. Musa Qusa himself is now in Qatar, where he is protected by the government.

The likelihood is that all those who might answer for the murder of WPC Fletcher, and even for other terrorist actions in the 1970s and 1980s, have their own people to answer to. Of course, the British state kissed and made up with Qaddafi and was happy to collude in its more recent acts of repression, so it is somewhat hypocritical to demand that we have priority in trying people who may have worked with our security forces more recently, for the small number of casualties they took here. It is rather like the situation when a company goes bankrupt: those they owed huge amounts of money because they took out large loans stand to get paid back before those who own £20 gift vouchers — the latter are probably going to be out of pocket. Britain is simply one small creditor among many.

Picture source: Daily Telegraph).

The above article is a rant by Liz Jones, normally a fashion columnist on the Daily Mail also well-known for covering in nauseous detail her relationship with Nirpal Dhaliwal, about how she tried to get immunisations at the last minute before going off to Somalia to “cover” the famine there. For that, she needed a huge number of vaccines: “hepatitis A and B, yellow fever, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, polio and so on”. Her private GP in Sloane Street, London, did the yellow fever jab straight away but for some reason could not do the others then or at all (the article does not make it clear), so she expected to just turn up at a NHS GP’s practice at a moment’s notice and get all her other jabs. Not surprisingly, she couldn’t. (More: Nicky Clark, Brian Kellett.)

She describes her exchange (not sure how truthfully) thus:

‘You are not registered?!’ the woman said, clearly appalled I had made her pick up the phone. ‘We can’t see you then. And we can’t fill out a prescription that hasn’t been written up by us.’

‘But I will pay for the jabs, it only takes a couple of minutes.’

‘But the nurse is fully booked. She can’t do it. I don’t even know if we have the drugs.’

‘Can you find out?’

‘Well, no. I’d have to ask her. And she can’t fit you in.’

‘But this is an emergency. I have never bothered you before in the three years I have lived here. Not with a snotty-nosed kid, not with depression, nothing. Never!’

‘But we don’t have your notes.’

‘You don’t need my notes. Lots of people go to walk-in centres. You could telephone my doctor if you’re worried about anything.’

‘I don’t have time to do that. Why don’t you go to A&E if it’s an emergency?’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t classify a routine jab as an emergency. I mean, it’s a global crisis. Millions of people are dying and you won’t put yourself out to allow me to be seen by a nurse, not even a doctor, for five minutes?’

‘No.’

The sense of entitlement here is extraordinary. Most people who use NHS GPs know that you have to wait for an appointment, particularly for something which is not an emergency (and if it really is an emergency, as the receptionist told her, you need to go to Accident and Emergency). If you want a particular doctor, and he or she is popular, you might have to wait even longer (as I did recently). Everyone knows that waiting is a fact of life when seeking non-emergency NHS care. As was pointed out in the comments, the doctors are busy seeing sick people and visiting the housebound, and vaccinations for a holiday or other non-essential trip are among the things that have to wait. And you do have to register, because they need to know what pre-existing conditions you have that might counterindicate (that means: make it a bad idea) one or more of the vaccines she was demanding. A GP is a local doctor, who is meant to know his patients, not deal with them off the street.

She tries to justify her demand to be seen now by bad-mouthing the clinic’s real patients, like the mothers concerned for their “snotty” kids’ health. GPs are the first port of call for any health-related referral, which is why I had to go to mine to get referred for a possible Asperger’s diagnosis, and this is why all those with depression go there even if they are not catastrophically, life-threateningly ill. Worse still, she then compares the frustration that led to this little trantrum to the very real abuse that went on at Winterbourne View and other “hospitals” for those with severe learning disabilities. Those institutions are run by private contractors, not the NHS itself, and those involved were mostly not nurses but low-paid nobodies picked up off the street. People like them were working at the boarding school I was at in the early 1990s, so not much has changed over the years. No doubt they, and the company who hired them, were contracted because they were cheap, and the NHS needs to spend money on making sure such places are fit for vulnerable people to live, but no doubt most people would agree that this is a more worthy priority than making sure that well-connected wealthy people like Liz Jones can get travel jabs at a moment’s notice lest they shout about it in the media the next day.

On top of this, the Hepatitis B vaccine is given in three parts, and it would not be effective if you only have the first part and then go somewhere that it is prevalent. People get mildly ill after having the injections (I know this as it happened to my sister, who needed them as she is becoming a nurse), and so travel in that state might not be such a great idea. Whoever made the decision to send Liz Jones to Somalia clearly miscalculated, because no doubt many journalists are available who are experienced in covering rural or underdeveloped tropical locations and would be prepared for travel, and Jones was not one of them. Her normal style of journalism does not really lend itself to sensitive coverage of a humanitarian emergency in a war-torn country with a wholly different culture to ours, and the decision to send her was an irresponsible and ill-informed one.

(Picture sourced from here.)

The Guardian today reported that an investigation by the paper had uncovered a fake vaccine programme in Abbotabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was reported found and assassinated earlier this year, which was conducted by local doctors in an attempt to get his family’s DNA. A local doctor, one Shakil Afridi, was one of a number of people arrested by the ISI (the Pakistani security police) and the only one still being held. The programme started by offering a free dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is normally given in three stages although in this case only one dose was given, in a poor district of Abbotabad before moving onto the wealthier district where Bin Laden lived. It is not clear whether they succeeded in gaining any of the Bin Ladens’ DNA. (More: Maggie Koerth-Baker @ Boing Boing, Maryn McKenna @ Wired.)

If true, this scheme is grossly irresponsible; it endangers the credibility of vaccine programmes throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim world where conspiracy theories about vaccines have circulated for decades, usually based on claims that they are laced with chemicals to reduce men’s fertility. It also bolsters the position of anti-vaccine activists in the west who can now claim that vaccines can be used for information gathering purposes. Surely they know that chances to eradicate polio have been missed because of such theories, much as the incidence of measles in the west rose after take-up of the MMR fell because of fears about autism.

The scam should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, yet I have not found any leader or opinion columns that even mention it in today’s British papers, and Google’s news search does not turn up any. Curbing the spread of disease should take precedence over all but the most essential security concerns, and getting rid of Osama bin Laden certainly does not fall into that category (at least, not in 2011). It is reported that Dr Afridi has been arrested for collaborating with the CIA, but any case against him should emphasise the damage he might have done to people’s health, and there must be an investigation into this in the USA also.

I am planning to attend the march organised by the Trades Union Congress this coming Saturday (26th March), but I am very uneasy about the plans to organise spin-off events including the shutting-down of a number of shops in the West End and occupations of Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. In the first case, some people attending want to get through, hear the rally and go home, and do not want to get caught in a police “kettle” intended to contain the disorder manufactured by fringe gangs of lunatics (the sort of groups which often get infiltrated by MI5 or Special Branch anyway). Among those attending are a large number of disabled people who are going to have personal needs to see to fairly soon after finishing the march, and getting penned in for several hours is going to be bad for their health.As for turning Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square, I’ve been to rallies in Trafalgar Square and remember one particular incident in which George Galloway exhorted the crowd to shout solidarity with the then besieged Fallujah (it was generally believed, rightly or otherwise, that those holding it were al-Qa’ida). The response was not particularly enthusiastic. Anyone familiar with the recent history of the Middle East, particularly the dictatorships outside the Gulf region, knows that the difficulties people are facing in the UK right now do not come close to what prompted the recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt — we are not living in a police state, we have a free press (certainly compared to anything found there), we don’t have “emergency laws” which allow people to be locked up for years for no real reason by military tribunals without any appeal (or just locked up without any trial at all), we are not forbidden from wearing what clothes we like as long as they’re decent (traditional Muslim dress is effectively banned in several Arab countries, particularly for men).

Yes, bad things are happening. It’s worth demonstrating to protect the mobility allowance for disabled people, and to save community centres that provide activities for local elderly and disabled people from being closed. But if a group of people decide to provide these services out of their own pockets, are they going to have their doors kicked in by the secret police, their computers and equipment seized, and the organisers carted off to jail? No, they won’t. People have been locked up in some countries for things which would not be considered out of the ordinary here, because the state recognises that this is dissident activities (such as organising screenings of Gandhi). These conditions don’t exist in this country, and nor do the stifling corruption present in both Tunisia and Egypt under the régimes that recently fell, so talking about Tahrir Square just smacks of overblown revolutionary rhetoric. To anyone who’s experienced a really repressive political atmosphere, it’s offensive.

As for closing shops in Oxford Street, these people could do this any time, but choosing the day of a big demonstration simply detracts from the power of the demonstration and makes life difficult for anyone who wants to get on with their business (perhaps after the demo). I’ve been uneasy about this kind of activity since my sister had a narrow escape from a McDonalds which was attacked by a mob of “anti-capitalists” a few years ago in London. They have had years to build up a head of steam for their revolution but only manage brief and pointless bursts of violence. Some might say demonstrating achieves nothing, but that kind of activity will achieve one thing — curtailing other people’s right to protest, while leaving the system they claim to despise intact.

The phrase used by Palmerston in Parliament to support that intervention — “civis Romanus sum” (I am a Roman citizen) — was what was used by the Roman empire to intervene on behalf of Roman citizens when they were threatened within the empire. Britain used to be an empire in the 1850s too, and had a navy to match. Now that pretty much every British citizen can travel anywhere, sending the Navy to rescue any British citizen who is in trouble anywhere in the world is going to be somewhat expensive. Gunboat diplomacy is a thing of the past.

Nor do I agree that the people out there “should have known” that there would be trouble because of the nature of Gadaffi’s regime. The fact is that nobody anticipated that this would happen as recently as a month and a half ago. Often political change happens suddenly; one of my politics lecturers at Aberystwth told a lecture theatre full of undergraduates that he had given a lecture very shortly before the Berlin Wall fell on “why the situation in Eastern Europe is secure”. When the rallies in Cairo were pre-announced on Facebook, it was widely assumed that they would not happen, or would be tiny affairs, or would be swiftly repressed, but they persisted for most of the next three weeks and resulted in Mubarak resigning.

What makes me uncomfortable about sending ships and planes to rescue all the British workers every time trouble breaks out in a foreign country is the question of why British people think they should be safe wherever they go, and that this safety should be at the expense of the British taxpayer at a time when services to vulnerable people (such as those with disabilities) are being cut to the bone in the UK, particularly if they have been working abroad and not paying taxes in the UK. Furthermore, why on earth should wealthy foreigners be evacuated while innocent locals (or other foreigners at even greater risk, such as African migrants who might be mistaken for mercenaries) are left behind in a war zone? I remember the scene in Hotel Rwanda when the Canadian officer told the hotel manager that his forces were not ordered to help the Tutsis who were being massacred, but only to evacuate westerners.

The UK has two air bases in Cyprus, not a million miles away from Tripoli, and could deal with this “instability” by knocking out the airports Gaddafi uses to bomb his own people, and a few other strategic sites to help the anti-Gaddafi forces (who allegedly control most of the country already) to finish the job. That would serve to bring an end to this situation more quickly and get rid of Gadaffi and his gang, which would be of huge benefit to everyone inside and outside of Libya, which merely evacuating “our people” wouldn’t do.

As it turns out, the rumours are just rumours, but as this article points out, it was mixed with a lot of hubris about how the mainstream media looked away as a momentous event was reported by ordinary people on Twitter. As it turns out, the person who started all the fuss admitted they’d made a mistake, or their source had, and there had been no coup.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard rumours of a coup on Twitter — at the time of the outrage over the Egyptians preventing Palestinians escape from Gaza or get into Gaza from Egypt, someone passed around a text message saying that the Egyptian army was going to stage a coup against Mubarak. Of course, the coup never happened. Why would a group of officers planning a coup against any government pass rumours about the operation beforehand? If they did that, they stand a much better chance of getting caught and thrown in jail, or executed.

If there is a coup, you’ll know when it’s happened, because it will be on the news and the new president will make an announcement on state TV. Rarely do they produce positive political change; they release a few political prisoners, make a show of “a new start” and perhaps put on a bit of religious piety, then go back to the old ways again within a matter of months. That’s what happened when the current president of Tunisia came to power.

This could, however, be said about this man’s victim; he is obviously very angry about having been paralysed, hence his desire for retaliation in kind. This type of punishment (called qisaas in Arabic) is standard for deliberate bodily injuries in Islamic law, as long as the injury can be replicated, which is not the case with internal injuries, particularly spinal cord injuries in which an injury at the same level in two people can produce different results, and there are some places in the spinal cord where this is more true than others, as I mentioned in my original post. The cause of the controversy was that the demand had been made and the judge had investigated, and found that at least one hospital was unwilling to perform the surgery, not that the operation had been done or had been decided on.

Kim mentioned that her quality of life had been better since her injury, but that is a very unusual situation and in many ways specific to her (such as the cerebral palsy it largely relieved her of). I would suppose that most people who have sustained spinal cord injuries were not extremely bitter but certainly would not say that it has improved their quality of life. People’s attitude may well depend on how the injury happened, and if it was caused by an assault, or by an accident involving a drunken or otherwise negligent driver, they are likely to be more negative about their situation than if it was a pure accident or an illness (as in Kim’s case) that caused it. There is also the question of what consequences the injury had, besides the usual changes a SCI brings: if someone cannot live with their family or in their own home and is forced into an institution, they are likely to feel more negatively about their injury than if they could live independently or with their family.

Ultimately, people do not welcome injury of any sort, and people whose faculties are intact want them to stay that way, and that is why we have punishments for injuring people. People react to injuries, or assaults, in different ways, and it shouldn’t have any bearing on how we deal with those who inflict them; I remember reading an interview with an elderly rape victim in the early 1990s who said that her attack had not caused her to feel shame or terrible trauma, but this is far from being the case for most rape victims and should not have lessened the rapist’s sentence had he been caught (he was in fact responsible for several rapes and murders but was identified as such after he committed suicide).

People are different, and much as some people like different foods or clothes to others, some people will adjust to radical changes in their circumstances, whether it be disability or poverty, differently from others. Of course, there are some with SCI who talk of their life being a living hell or being imprisoned in their own bodies, and loudly claim that not enough research is being done even though a lot of money is being spent on such research, it has had prominent celebrity support (Christopher Reeve, for example), and they are certainly not prisoners (unlike someone with severe ME, who may be a young girl shut in a dark room for years and suffering intense pain and other distressing symptoms, and there is a definite dearth of research into that illness). But it’s no use for someone who has adjusted fairly easily to a spinal cord injury saying of someone who doesn’t, “why can’t he/she feel like me?”, because most people who sustain such injuries just don’t.

The article alleges that, although Islamic organisations will tell you that honour killings have nothing to do with Islam, “Islamic orthodoxy generally condones the practice, whilst not explicitly recommending it per se”. He cites as the “most egregious case” the book Umdat al-Salik, which he translates as “Reliance of the Sojourner” even though it is translated into English as “Reliance of the Traveller”, which he calls “a manual on Shari’a (Islamic law) certified by Al-Azhar University, the most prominent and authoritative institute of Islamic jurisprudence in the world, as a reliable guide to orthodox Sunni Islam”. Al-Azhar is, of course, an important centre of Islamic scholarship, but it is not “the most authoritative”, particularly in this day and age although many individual scholars at al-Azhar are well-regarded. The book also has endorsements from scholars in Syria and Jordan.

He claims:

The manual states (01.1-2) that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right,” except when “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers)” kills his or her “offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” Hence, according to this view a parent, who murders his or her son/daughter for the sake of “honor,” whether owing to issues of chastity, apostasy and the like, incurs no penalty under Shari’a. This ruling is derived from a hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Number 4457) where it is affirmed that one should not kill a child unless one could know “what Khadir had known about the child he killed.” Khadir is a figure featured in the Qur’an who accompanies Moses on a journey and kills a son of believing parents for fear that he would rebel against the will of God (18:74 and 18:80-81).

The statement about retaliation not being obligatory when the killer is an ancestor is accurate, but what this means is that the victim’s immediate family have no automatic right to demand the death penalty. There are other categories of penalty in Islamic law, including the fixed penalties called hudood (hadd is the singular) and discretionary penalties or ta’zeer. The last is what is appropriate in such cases: it is down to the judge to set the appropriate punishment, and whether he can impose the death penalty is something you will have to ask a scholar about, but it is inconceivable that anyone should be able to get away with killing a child unjustly.

As for the hadeeth basis for the ruling, I have seen an explicit hadeeth which opposes submitting someone to retaliation for killing one of their children. As far as the story of Khidr (the “Khadir” in that article) is concerned, it is explained in more detail elsewhere by the Reliance’s translator, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, because it is commonly used to justify unlawful acts by so-called saints or mystics as Khidr (peace be upon him) clearly does things that would be unlawful if done by anyone else. In fact, he had the knowledge referred to here precisely because he was a Prophet, a rank nobody has today, or for that matter, had in the time the Reliance was written. So, the hadeeth makes it clear that killing a child is forbidden, full stop.

Al-Tamimi (if that is his real name) claims:

Therefore, it is incumbent on human rights organizations working in the Muslim world to put pressure on Islamic religious authorities to denounce unequivocally the practice of honor killings, discuss openly and honestly the religious basis that condones the custom, and work to formulate a reformed interpretation of core Islamic texts that teaches why honor killings are wrong from a religious viewpoint, all of which will end impediments to introducing stricter legal punishments for honor killings in Muslim countries.

However, Islamic law already condemns such killings, and the reason there is resistance to changing the law has much to do with the force of tradition and nothing at all to do with the killings being in any way religiously justified. There are already human rights groups working to protect women from honour killings in some of these countries, and there are shelters for women (although a lot of women at risk from such killing end up in prison for their own protection) and lawyers who help them prosecute violent relatives. The fact that these people face a difficult job because of corruption and entrenched local tradition does not mean that what they are doing is not part of Islam; as Robert Fisk points out, a substantial proportion of honour killings in these places is the work of non-Muslims, and there are large parts of the Muslim world where honour killings aren’t at all common, so clearly it has much to do with local tradition and nothing to do with Islam.

The best version of this story is this one from the New Zealand Herald. What it makes clear is that the leading hospital in Saudi Arabia, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, said it couldn’t be done and wasn’t ethical according to the Saudi newspaper Okaz. Whether any other hospital will do it remains to be seen. Cutting through people’s spinal cords isn’t exactly what doctors do every day but the surgery has its uses — people with spinal cord injuries often experience spasms, and if you cut below the level of an existing injury, it can relieve that problem. A lot of doctors will consider that deliberately paralysing a healthy man, even in these circumstances, is against the oath they took when they became doctors.

As brother Abu Eesa points out here (and here), the norm is for the judge to really beg the victim’s family to pardon the assailant or accept financial compensation. In addition, if it is not possible to replicate the exact injury, then retaliation is no longer an option and financial compensation is what is appropriate, and this is particularly true with internal injuries. It is virtually impossible to replicate the effects of one spinal cord injury upon another person, particularly if the injury is incomplete, because everyone’s nervous system is slightly different.

But depending on where the injury happens, even a complete injury can have very different effects from person to person. The C4 area (the fourth vertebra down in the neck), for example, is one where there is a great deal of variation: some may have some arm function, enough to steer their wheelchair (invariably a powered one), feed themselves or drive; others have no arm function at all. Some with a C6 injury will be able to look after themselves entirely, others will need someone to help wash and dress them, and so on. Spinal cord injuries also often lead to complications, and they will be different from person to person (some will become incontinent, others over-continent and needing to use a catheter, for example). These are, I imagine, impossible to replicate.

So, despite this story grossing out a lot of people and becoming another excuse for people to call Islamic law barbaric (much as happens every time an obscure scholar from the Saudi interior issues a bizarre fatwa), there is a strong chance that the punishment won’t in fact happen at all. What has been reported is that the victim has demanded it — two years after the event, and after his assailant has already done jail time — and that the judge has investigated the possibility, but that’s not the same thing as a man already having been paralysed.

I’ll do the Frostrup one first. This is a British woman who met a Yemeni Muslim man who’s 29; his wife is 23, he married her when he was 15, and they have four children. Yet, this man doesn’t love his wife and they no longer have sex, because she’s smelled her perfume and knows he’s cheating on her. He can’t get rid of her because she’s his cousin and the mother of his children, and because his father would chuck him out and leave him without a place in the family business, and penniless.

Frostrup tells her that this man has already had “sexual relations with a child” which is illegal in this country regardless of whether it’s their culture or not. Well, if the relations took place outside the country, such as in Yemen, the law of this country does not matter. She was only a year younger than the age of consent in the UK anyway, and it’s lower in much of Europe, never mind Yemen. She also assumes that her correspondent converted to Islam only for the sake of her lover, giving her a lecture on how their behaviour makes bad Muslims of both of them:

In Yemen, women are stoned to death for such “licentious” behaviour, so thank your lucky stars your “crime” is being committed over here. I’m certainly not condoning such Stone Age punishment but trying to make you understand the enormity of your actions.

Unfortunately, I can’t get access to the Facebook debate which started when Fareena shared it, because my account is suspended due to an upgrade, but despite someone saying that it was traumatising to see that it was a non-Muslim woman talking sense to a Muslim one, I’m not wholly convinced that the story is genuine. It is too much one of those daytime TV programmes in which stupid people try to get stupid problems resolved by a TV presenter. All too often it’s a woman who has some piece of dead wood she, for some inexplicable reason, can’t seem to dump. This woman, religious or not, is a married man’s bit on the side. Islam has nothing to do with it other than that he is Muslim and that she has converted (if either of them exist), probably in the hope that he will take her on.

However, one thing Frostrup didn’t see fit to point out is that, if this man’s wife really has had four children in eight years, then she probably has her hands full and is unlikely to be the same girl she was when he married her in her early teens. The couple are still young and it is unlikely that he would have married someone he had absolutely no feelings for or attraction to. It is just wrong for a second woman to interfere in a vulnerable, but still viable, marriage in this way.

Onto Achelois’s post. This was flagged up by a tweet from Organica last Friday and I replied that polygamy was part of the Sunnah and that you couldn’t blame it for the fact that some polygamists were bad. I’ve personally seen Muslim men in monogamous marriages in the west who treat their wives with as much contempt as described in that post. Some are cynical, making promises to their wives before marriage knowing that, legally, they cannot be held to them. I’ve told the story before of how I was approached by a Kenyan family in east London whose daughter supposedly wanted to get married, but decided otherwise because her elder sister, who had married a “salafi” white convert, was told she could continue at college before marriage but was expected to drop out afterwards. The woman suggested to me did not trust that I would allow her to continue her studies, whatever I promised. I’ve also heard of sisters who were members of a Sufi tariqa being told by their non-tariqa fiancés that they could attend the big national gatherings, but their husbands “changed their minds” later.

Achelois’s post consists of a number of stories of polygamist husbands in some unnamed Gulf country treating their wives and daughters badly, among them one who refused to let his daughter go to college because he wouldn’t let anyone but himself drive her there, and he was out of town visiting his other wife. Another was a wife who was accused of adultery and divorced because she bore a child when the husband believed he had a “low sperm count” due to a medical condition, so the baby could not be his.

Neither of these stories need be directly related to polygamy, of course. The first husband could have done the same when he was away on business. The actions of the second, however, are clearly very much contrary to Islamic law as a husband is only allowed to accuse his wife of adultery if he actually catches her doing it, or if she bears a child when he has not had sex with her or he knows for sure that he is infertile, such as having lost his testicles years ago and functioning on HRT since. “Low sperm count” does not mean certain infertility; it just meant he was unlikely to have children. This is even true if a white couple have a dark-skinned baby, as testified to in a hadeeth; this could be caused by there being black ancestry in the family, much as happens when a light-coloured camel bears a dark-haired foal. This is, of course, very likely in Arabia which is right next to Africa and a lot of people are mixed-race, but it has even happened among white Afrikaners in South Africa.

Achelois has made her distaste for polygamy known in the past, based on matters of her family history, but polygamy does not in itself mean that a man will be a pig to his wife; it just means that a pig has two, three or four wives to oppress rather than just one. Monogamy is not a new thing in the west. Achelois calls polygamy a “pre-evolution” relic, “an archaic practice from when societies and human beings didn’t know and hadn’t learnt the value of human life and feelings”. The fact is that monogamy was the enforced norm in the west long before feminism or other modern ideas like representative democracy or the rule of law had been heard of. Marriages were notoriously difficult to get out of in most western countries until quite recently; some countries, particularly in the Latin-speaking Catholic world, still prohibit divorce. Churches told women who were in abusive marriages that marriage was for life — for better or worse, richer or poorer, etc.

Evolution is a modern, western concept and “evolved” always seems to mean being more like middle-class urban white westerners. Does anyone really suppose that there aren’t a fair number of such people carrying on relationships on the side, or maintaining multiple relationsihps without marrying any of them? There are entire social movements these days which embrace “polyamory”, meaning multiple relationships, with or without marriage, for both men and women. (Why does Islam permit polygyny but not multiple husbands? One good reason is that a child has a right to know who his or her father is, which would not be possible if a woman had two or more husbands, particularly if they were the same colour.) I do not doubt that there are men who abuse polygamy, but these sorts would abuse single wives or even other people generally, and there are sometimes very good reasons for having it (such as after a war), and some women for whom sharing a husband means more time to themselves. I have always said that Muslim men should recognise that most women do not like it and respect that, but we cannot blame it for men not treating their wives decently. It is just a separate issue.