Morganatic marriage

“ Almost all marriages are only concubinages, morganatic wedlock, or, rather, provisional attempts and remote approximations to a real marriage, the peculiar essence of which consists in the fact that more than one person are to become but one, not in accordance with the paradoxes of this system or that, but in harmony with all spiritual and temporal laws. ”

“ Could English girls realize the misery in store for them in marrying Mohammedan husbands, they would be thankful for any warning. Even if the husband himself is kind, there are many painful things to undergo from his women relatives. And worse than all is the denying of Christ before men in the acceptance of Islam. One of these English women living in Syria as the wife of a Mohammedan, had her daughter married to an own cousin at the age of thirteen, another was obliged to give her ten-year-old daughter in marriage. ”

“ The relation of wife to husband is finally fixed in all its details by the Mohammedan law, and, as we have seen, there must be no conditions made on either side in the marriage contract, a fortiori none that would in any way modify this relation. The position of the wife as defined by the fiqh or law of Islam is in many ways a very unfavourable one, and this not merely as measured by European standards; yet in many Mohammedan countries there prevails in practice an interpretation of the law much more favourable to the woman. ”

“ Must I not for myself, hate the idea of marriage, scorn it, when by it the woman is so cruelly wronged? No, fortunately every Mohammedan has not four wives or more, but every married woman in our world knows that she is not the only one, and that any day the man's fancy can bring a companion home, who will have just as much right to him as she. According to the Mohammedan law she is also his wife. In the Government [2] countries, the women have not such a hard time as their sisters in those ruled by the princes, as in Soerakarta and Djokjakarta. ”

“ A man can marry the sister of his late wife, but he cannot have two sisters to wife at the same time. There is a regular ceremony whereby the newly-married bride is introduced into her husband’s family. His relatives assemble, eat food cooked by her, and then make her a present. As a rule they practise monogamy. Polyandry is prohibited; concubinage with a woman of the tribe in the Dharauna form is recognised. Marriage is both infant and adult. A wife can be divorced for infidelity, and after divorce she can live with a man by the Dharauna form. ”

“ Marriage by purchase and Islamite polygamy, which regard woman as merchandise and place her entirely under the dependence of man, are barbarous customs of semi-civilized people, which have already fallen into disuse. Polyandry is contrary to human nature and to the requirements of reproduction, and its [182] implantation is everywhere a sign of decadence. Our present religious monogamy, completed by the shameful promiscuity of prostitution, is both hypocritical and unhealthy. ”

“ The selfishness of mankind, as distinguished from womankind, delayed the realization of strict monogamy until that great fermentation of the human mind which ushered in civilization.
Two forms of the family had appeared before the syndyasmian and created two great systems of consanguinity, or rather two distinct forms of the same system; but this third family neither produced a new system nor sensibly modified the old. Certain marriage relationships appear to have been changed to accord with those in the new family ”

“ He retains the children, and he may marry again. The woman is generally expected to bring her husband a considerable sum in the way of dowry, but, on separation, she gets nothing back. This was the Boab's account, but I think he has overdone the harshness and injustice of the Mohammedan law of marriage in relating it to our tourists. It may be observed that the strict law is rarely acted upon, and many respectable Moors have told me that they have but one wife, and find that quite enough. ”

“ Polygamy is allowed, but monogamy is the rule. The head wife alone joins in family worship. Concubinage and polyandry are prohibited. The marriage age for boys or girls is ten or twelve. There is no purchasing of brides, but her relations have to give a dowry, and it is considered discreditable not to provide this to a suitable amount. Adultery in husband or wife, and eating or smoking with a strange caste, are grounds for divorce. A divorced woman cannot re-marry. Widow marriage in the sagâi form is allowed. ”

“ It is not at all doubtful that it sanctions, and sometimes eminently blesses, polygamy; that it strictly enjoins that, in every case of adultery, both parties should be put to death; that it makes it a capital offence for a man to have intercourse with a woman who, though unmarried, was betrothed to another; that it commands that a man who had defiled an unbetrothed virgin should be compelled to marry her; that it forbids marriage with aliens in religion ”

“ The Mormons have been, for a quarter of a century, openly affirming, upon the authority of a new revelation and the establishment of a distinctive institution, that Gentile monogamy is not good. But more than this is in their history, their religion, and their social examples. They have made marriage one of their greatest problems. And they accept the patriarchal order of marriage, according to the Bible examples, and the revelation of their prophet, as a proper solution.
To Gentile Christians, monogamy is good, and polygamy barbarous. ”

“ The women of Mormondom are as free to bestow or withhold their hands in marriage as they are in England, and {184} there has not been a day since 1862—the year in which the first law of Congress was passed against polygamy—but what it has been within the power of the wife or wives of a man to send him to the penitentiary, the United States Courts being only too glad to entertain her suit, and break up the polygamous family associations. ”

“ Among the Iroquois, where the family is syndyasmian, a man still calls his brother’s son his son, although his brother’s wife has ceased to be his wife; and so with a large number of relationships equally inconsistent with the existing form of marriage. The system has survived the usages in which it originated, and still maintains itself among them, although untrue in the main, to descents as they now exist. No motive adequate to the overthrow of a great and ancient system of consanguinity had arisen. ”

“ There seems, however, to be an increasing tendency towards the more respectable form of marriage, and some of them not only profess to have a law of exogamy to this extent that they will not give their boys to, or take a bride from, a family with which within memory they have been allied by marriage, but they also pretend to allow the levirate under the usual restrictions, and permit widow marriage. When they do marry in the caste continence is compulsory on the wife, and her husband can put her away for infidelity proved to the satisfaction of the tribal council. ”

“ Our monogamy is constantly varied by polygyny, or pseudo-polygamy, lacking the sanctions and responsibilities of Mohammedan plurality. Side by side with monogamic marriage, concubinage has always existed. ”

“ The Chaldean tribes recognized the right of a wife to impose a premarital pledge upon her spouse not to take a second wife or concubine; both the Greeks and the Romans favored monogamous marriage. Ancestor worship has always fostered monogamy, as has the Christian error of regarding marriage as a sacrament. Even the elevation of the standard of living has consistently militated against plural wives. By the time of Mchael's advent on Urantia practically all of the civilized world had attained the level of theoretical monogamy. ”

“ Polygamy is allowed here as in other Mohammedan lands, but only the wealthier natives and the princes are guilty of it. The facility with which marriages are made, and divorces obtained, is one cause why it is not more general. In regard to the evil effects of polygamy, and the ideas of this people in respect to the sacred rite of marriage, Sir Stamford Raffles, who was Governor-General of Java, most truthfully remarks: “Of the causes which have tended to lower the character of the Asiatics in comparison with Europeans, none has had a more decided influence than polygamy. ”

“ In Mathura persons of the same gotra cannot intermarry, and the gotras of a man’s mother and grandmother are also barred. Marriage with two sisters is permitted. Sexual license before marriage is everywhere prohibited. Polyandry is nowhere recognized; and, while polygamy is allowed, it is restricted to cases when the first wife is barren or permanently disabled by disease. The actual marriage ceremony is of the usual low caste type. ”

“ Yet it would be hard to lay the blame altogether on Moḥammad. The real roots of the degradation of women lie much deeper. When Islám was [Pg xc] instituted, polygamy was almost necessitated by the number of women and their need of support; and the facility of divorce was quite necessitated by the separation of the sexes, and the consequence that a man could not know or even see the woman he was about to marry before the marriage ceremony was accomplished. It is not Moḥammad whom we must blame for these great evils, polygamy and divorce ”

“ Probably a Mohammedan would not see the inconsistency of condemning to death the child-victim of a man's lust, as in the first instance given, while practically the same thing is legalized in allowing the marriage of children with the probability of a divorce in the near future. How can they hope for the growth of purity among their women, or wonder when immorality and unchastity are discovered! ”

“ They may take two wives at one time. The favourite wife for the time being rules the household. Concubinage with women of the tribe is allowed; polyandry is prohibited. [209] Marriage is both adult and infant. Divorce is permitted in case of infidelity on the part of the woman. The husband merely assembles the clansmen, and announces to them the fact of the divorce. Divorced wives cannot be re-married; but they may be kept as concubines by other men in the caste. ”

“ The nearest neighbours are at the most invited to a dinner; merissa is served up, and the whole affair is concluded with the customary dances. If the bride belong to one of the tribes who practise circumcision, she is certainly forced to subject herself to a fresh operation twenty [82] days before her marriage. When a woman is ill-treated by her husband, or there exists any other cogent reason, she requests to be divorced from him, and the separation is effected without the slightest difficulty. ”

“ It is doubtful whether a scarcity of women existed in early times; and supposing that there were not women enough in a clan for the men of the clan, this would not stand in the way of men's taking as wives their clan women.782 The assumption of primitive sexual promiscuity, likewise, cannot be said to be distinctly borne out by known facts.783 Morgan's theory, however, is not dependent on this assumption—it need only suppose repugnance to the marriage of blood relations. ”

“ The men who were forced to accept Mohammedanism were compelled to take their own sisters-in-law, whose husbands have been killed, to wife—a practice most horrible to the Christians, who hated polygamy. ”

“ In many forms of marriage by purchase, the wife is even bound to return to her husband the sum paid for her if she remains sterile, and among many savages the marriage is only celebrated after the birth of the first child. In Borneo, relations between the sexes are free till pregnancy occurs, and it is this which determines the duties of marriage. In this respect, these savages are more just and wiser than us.
In man, a special reason in favor of marriage is the fact that he has no rutting period. ”

“ All Mohammedan law-books teach the opposite; it is only the woman who is bound to surrender her person. Divorce owing to impotence only takes place because the object to be attained by marriage (that is, according to the law-books, sexual union) is thereby rendered impossible, so that there is no longer any reason why the marriage should continue. ↑ In some districts we find conditions whose object is simply religious, e. g. "If I neglect the obligatory prayers or fasts or drink arak or gamble" etc. etc. ↑ Absurd as it may appear, neither of these are mentioned by Van den Berg. ”

“ Marriage between single pairs had existed from the Older Period of barbarism, under the form of pairing during the pleasure of the parties. It had tended to grow more stable as ancient society advanced, with the improvement of institutions, and with the progress of inventions and discoveries into higher successive conditions; but the essential element of the monogamian family, an exclusive cohabitation, was still wanting. Man far back in barbarism began to exact fidelity from the wife, under savage penalties, but he claimed exemption for himself. ”

“ Judged from the standpoint of Christian monogamic principles, the marriage rules of Mohammed "render the Christian ideal of domestic life an impossibility." Such is the view of Mr. J. W. H. Stobart, the author of "Islam and its Founder." We have seen, however, that "the ideal of domestic life " as upheld in Egypt, was humane, and perhaps the best that the world has known.
But let us examine the position of women in polygamy as permitted by the founder of the Moslem religion. It is commonly declared that women are excluded from the Paradise of the Mohammedans. ”

“ In the face of the primitive aversion to woman as the source of contamination through sympathetic magic, or as the seat of some mystic force, whether of good or evil, it may well be asked how man ever dared let his sexual longings overcome his fears and risk the dangers of so intimate a relationship. Only by some religious ceremonial, some act of purification, could man hope to counteract these properties of woman; and thus the marriage ritual came into existence. By the marriage ceremonial, the breach of taboo was expiated, condoned, and socially countenanced. ”