After the initial analyses, now it is time to look at the verses of the Quran to see the status of polyandry. We are going to look at if there are any verses that are explicitly contradicting the practice of polyandry or verses whose implications are not compatible with polyandry. In order to keep the discussion brief, I am going to spare the details, unless a request for otherwise is sent.
All arguments against polyandry have child making and a possible confusion about the father as one of their bases. We already discussed this issue before in the first episode, but what I want to focus on here is a different dimension of marriage. All those arguments also introduce marriage exclusively as an institution for child making, as if marriage does not exist without the concept of child making. However, there is nothing that supports this notion in the Quran. Plus, if that was the case, the marriage of the people who cannot have child for biological reasons would become invalid. So, making children is a supplementary concept that comes on top of the concept of marriage. Once we separate these two concepts, i.e. marriage and child making, and realize that marriage comes at a more fundamental level than child making, then it becomes easier to penetrate the millennium long accumulation of information and directly reach the Quran to study the topic with fresh eyes.
Then the very first question we need to answer is what is marriage according to the Quran. In trying to answer this question, we can quickly see both what it is and what it is not.
"Marry the spouseless among you, and your slaves and handmaidens that are righteous; if they are poor, God will enrich them of His bounty; God is All-embracing, All-knowing." (24/32)
Marriage is not an act that is exclusively the right of the wealthy. Furthermore, believers are hereby given the responsibility to help the financially challenged people to get married. Therefore, financial responsibilities cannot be preclusion to marriage. It has to be noted that this superior position of marriage to financial status is due to its power to protect people from the prohibitions of God. Of course in a marriage, at least minimal economic wellbeing is of essence, however this wellbeing for the transient world cannot come before the wellbeing in the eternal world. So, the real condition that makes marriage a priority above other facts of life is that it enables people to lead a life of respect to God. And this condition is valid both for men and women. This is why polygyny is conditionally allowed in the Quran in the first place (4/3). By the same token, if a woman is in need of more than one man, her intention to protect herself from the prohibitions of God through marriage should be compatible with the teachings of the Quran.
To give you a better perspective, let me tell how the situation would be solved according to the existing, classical understanding. So, we are talking about a marriage in which the man is unable to meet the sexual and romantic needs of the woman. The situation is so serious that the woman finds herself in a constant mood of desiring attention from outside. That is, she is in a constant fight against herself in her everyday life in order to guard herself from the prohibitions of God. According to the classical view, she must divorce this husband and find another one that would meet her demands. To do this, she must return the dowry (mahr) that was given to her by her husband and seek divorce from the authorities. Assuming that this process goes through smoothly, without any obstacles due to prejudices and patriarchal culture, she can finally look out. And let's hope that the next person she finds is sexually potent enough, because there is no way for her to measure this, given that pre-marriage sex is not allowed in Islam.
However, we all know that in reality, the smooth flow of events told above is almost impossible due to economical or cultural reasons. Plus, the husband resists the divorce, because the entire situation is simply unacceptable from a male perspective. And how the authorities would handle the case is another matter. So, the woman is left alone to her fight in her being. And God forbid, if she loses the battle to herself and gets into a secret affair, then she is risking being stoned to death (which is another issue to discuss). All because she is not given the same sexual rights and freedoms that are given to men in the classical understanding.
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