Al-Baiẓāwī, the Jalālān, and other Sunnī commentators, are all agreed that the true reading of the verse limits the number of lawful wives to four. The Shīʿahs also hold the same opinion, but they sanction Mutʿah, or “temporary marriages.” [[MUʿTAH].]
In the face of the united testimony of Islām founded upon the express injunctions of the Qurʾān, Syed Ameer Ali has the audacity to state in his Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Muhammad, p. 223, that “the greatest and most reprehensible mistake committed by Christian writers, is to suppose that Muhammad either adopted or legalised polygamy. The old idea of his having introduced it—a sign only of the ignorance of those who hold it—is by this time exploded, but the opinion that he adopted and legalised the custom is still maintained by the common masses as by many learned in Christendom. No belief can be more false”!
In his more recent work on the Personal Law of the Muḥammadans, the same writer remarks:—
“Muhammad restrained polygamy by limiting the maximum number of contemporaneous marriages, and by making absolute equity towards all obligatory on the man. It is worthy of note that the clause in the Qurán, which contains the permission to contract four contemporaneous marriages is immediately followed by a sentence which cuts down the significance of the preceding passage to its normal and legitimate dimensions. The former passage says, ‘You may marry two, three, or four wives, but not more.’ The subsequent lines declare, ‘but if you cannot deal equitably and justly with all you shall marry only one.’ The extreme importance of this proviso, bearing especially in mind the meaning which is attached to the word ‘equity’ (ʿadl) in the Quranic teachings, has not been lost sight of by the great thinkers of the Moslem world. Even so early as the third century of the era of the Hijra during the reign of al-Mâmûn, the first Motazalite doctors taught that the developed Quranic laws inculcated monogamy. And though the cruel persecutions of the mad bigot, Mutawwakil, prevented the general diffusion of their teachings, the conviction is gradually forcing itself on all sides, in all advanced Moslem communities, that polygamy is as much opposed to the Islâmic laws as it is to the general progress of civilised society and true culture. In India especially, this idea is becoming a strong moral, if not a religious conviction, and many extraneous circumstances in combination with this growing feeling are tending to root out the existence of polygamy from among the Mussulmans. A custom has grown up in that country, which is largely followed by all classes of the community, of drawing up a marriage deed containing a formal renunciation, on the part of the future husband, of any right or semblance of right which he might possess or claim to possess to contract a second marriage during the existence of the first. This custom serves as a most efficacious check upon the growth and the perpetuation of the institution of polygamy. In India more than ninety-five per cent. of Muhammadans are at the present moment, either by conviction or necessity, monogamists. Among the educated classes, versed in the history of their ancestors, and able to compare it with the records of other nations, the custom is regarded with disapprobation, amounting almost to disgust. In Persia, according to Colonel Macgregor’s statement, only two per cent. of the population enjoy the questionable luxury of plurality of wives. It is earnestly to be hoped that before long a general synod of Moslem doctors will authoritatively declare that polygamy, like slavery, is abhorrent to the laws of Islam.” (Personal Law of the Muhammadans, p. 28.)
Syud Ahmad Khan Bahadur, in his essay, Whether Islam has been beneficial or injurious to Society in general, on the contrary, defends the institution of polygamy as divine, and quotes John Milton, Mr. Davenport, and Mr. Higgins, as Christian writers who defended the practice.
The Prophet claimed considerable indulgence for himself in the matter, and married eleven wives. [[WIVES OF THE PROPHET].]
The views of Dr. Marcus Dods in his Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ (p. 55), give an able and interesting summary of the subject:—
“The defence of polygamy has been undertaken from various points of view, and with varying degrees of insight and of earnestness. But one cannot detect much progress among its defenders. F. W. Newman has nothing to say in its favour which had not previously been suggested by Voltaire; nothing, we may say, which does not occur to anyone who wishes to present the argument for a plurality of wives. It is somewhat late in the day to be called upon to argue for monogamy as abstractly right. Speculators like Aristotle (Econ. i. 2, 8), who have viewed the subject both as statesmen having a regard to what is practicable and will conduce to social prosperity, and as philosophers reasoning from first principles, have long ago demanded for their ideal society, not only monogamy, but also that mutual respect and love, and that strict purity and modesty, which polygamy kills. Let us say briefly that the only ground conscience recognises as warranting two persons to become one in flesh is that they be, first of all, one in spirit. That absolute surrender of the person which constitutes marriage is justified only by the circumstances that it is a surrender of the heart as well, and that it is mutual. To an ideal love, polygamy is abhorrent and impossible. As Mohammed himself, in another connection, and with more than his usual profundity, said, ‘God has not put two hearts in you.’ This is the grand law imbedded in our nature, and by which it is secured that the children born into the world be the fruit of the devoted surrender of one human spirit to another; by which, in other words, it is secured that love, the root principle of all human virtue and duty, be transmitted to the child and born in it. This is the beneficent law expressed in monogamy, and this law is traversed and robbed of its effects precisely in so far as even monogamous marriages are prompted by fleshly or worldly rather than by spiritual motives. The utilitarian argument Mr. Lecky (Hist. European Morals, vol. ii. p. 295) has summed up in three sentences: ‘Nature, by making the number of males and females nearly equal, indicates it as natural. In no other form of marriage can the government of the family, which is one of the chief ends of marriage, be so happily sustained; and in no other does the woman assume the position of the equal of man.’ But we have here to do only with Mohammedan apologists, and their reasonings are somewhat perplexing; for they first maintain that nature intended us to be polygamists (see Syud Ahmad’s Essay, p. 8; Syud Ameer Ali’s Crit. Exam., p. 225), and then, secondly, declare that ‘the greatest and most reprehensible mistake committed by Christian writers is to suppose that Mohammed either adopted or legalised polygamy.’ Probably the most that can be said for Mohammed in regard to this matter, is that he restricted polygamy, and that its abolition was impossible and unsuitable to the population he had to do with.
“The allegation, however, that Mohammed confined polygamy within narrower limits than the Arabs had previously recognised, though true, is immaterial. For, in the first place, he restricted polygamy indeed in others, but not in his own case; and thus left upon the minds of his followers the inevitable impression that an unrestricted polygamy was the higher state of the two.
“In the second place, while he restricted the number of lawful wives, he did not restrict the number of slave-concubines. In the third place, his restriction was practically of little value, because very few men could afford to keep more than four wives. And, lastly, as to the principle, he left it precisely where it was, for as Mr. Freeman justly observes (Lectures, p. 69): ‘This is one of the cases in which the first step is everything. The difference between one wife and two is everything; that between four and five thousand is comparatively nothing.’