ABSTRACT
Ibu Hayinah is a woman’s activist in Aisyiyah, the women’s wing of Muhammadiyah, and her view of polygamy, related in the quotation above, is one held by the majority of Indonesian Muslims. From Kartini’s era until the present, this belief that polygamy is a religious rule has persisted, as if the claim that ‘polygamy is permitted in Islam’ is the only truth; as if this belief has to be taken for granted; as if this belief is divine and therefore cannot be challenged or changed; and as if challenging polygamy is equivalent to challenging Islam. In contrast, this book argues that polygamy is not a religious rule or an Islamic value. Polygamy is a pre-Islamic practice which has been regulated by Islam in order to prevent injustice to powerless orphans. Thus, what is Islamic in the Qur’anic verses 4: 2-3 is not ‘the practice of polygamy itself’ but ‘the importance of being just to the powerless’. As this research suggests, polygamy can lead to unjust treatment of women and their children. This book takes the view that to prevent such injustice (and given that preventing injustice is an Islamic value accepted by all schools of Islamic thought), the Indonesian Marriage Law should be modified to abolish the practice of polygamy.
