New polygamy campaigns trigger old controversies

Jakarta: A deep-rooted controversy over polygamy once again takes centre stage in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

Campaigns supporting polygamy have gone viral on social media after popular Islamic preacher Muhammad Arifin Ilham posted a short video with three of his wives on his Facebook and Instagram accounts last Wednesday.

“With my three angels from Aceh, from Yaman and from Sunda, a 37-year-old widow with two children,” the caption said.

In the video, the three wives are seen posing with Arifin, then listening to him giving a lecture on sakinah (happy family).

With more than 6.9 million followers on his Facebook page and 290,000 followers on Instagram, the post garnered hundreds of both supporting and castigating comments in less than an hour.

Disapproving netizens, mostly women, slammed the way Arifin promoted his polygamous marriage, with many accusing him of using religious worship as an excuse to satisfy his sexual appetite.

The video was followed by numerous campaigns calling on men to maintain their enthusiastic pursuit of polygamy, calling it a sunnah (recommended practice) of Prophet Muhammad.

Those in support of the practice argued that having multiple wives was better than committing adultery. Discussion groups have even emerged on how to practise polyga- my properly and how to convince wives to accept polygamous marriages.

Last month, a Tinder-style dating app called Ayo Poligami (Let’s Practise Polygamy) triggered public concern. The app’s developer, Lindu Cipta Pranayama, claimed he just wanted to help unmarried middle-aged women.

Launched in April, it currently has more than 56,000 members.

The pro-polygamy campaigns have raised concerns among activists who consider them detrimental to women’s rights and argue that polygamous marriages often lead to domestic violence.

When the wives live polygamous marriages, they usually suffer verbal, physical, psychological and eco- nomic violence, said Nila Nurmila of the National Commission on Violence Against Women, citing her research on polygamy in 2004.

According to her findings, the trend of polygamy has increased in the past 10 years amid growing fundamentalism and radicalism.

What is worse, she added, is that it is being promoted by popular religious figures.

The government has no exact record of the number of polygamous marriages in the country, but data from the Legal Aid Foundation of Indonesian Women’s Association for Justice shows that 106 cases of violence against women the group represented between 2001 and 2005 were related to polygamy. — The Jakarta Post/Asia News Network