The Rights of Husband and Wife

industrial age, such accidents are so much on the increase that a whole new discipline has come into being — safety engineering. According to data collected in 1967, in that year a total of 175,000 people died as the result of accidents in fifty different countries. Most of these were men.4 In spite of safety engineering, casualties from industrial accidents have increased. For instance, the number of air accidents in 1988 was higher than ever before. Similarly, experimentation in arsenals continues to kill people in all industrialized countries, but the death toll is never made public. Here again, it is men who have the highest casualty rate. For reasons of this nature, women continue to outnumber men. This difference persists in even the most developed societies, e.g. in America. According to data collected in 1967, there were nearly 7,100,000 more women than men. This means that even if every single man in America got married, 7,100,000 women would be left without husbands. We give below the data of several western countries to show the ratio of men to women.5 Country Male Female Austria 47.7% 52.93% Burma 48.81 51.19 Germany 48.02 51.89 France 48.99 51.01 Italy 48.89 51.01 Poland 48.61 51.30 Spain 48.94 51.06 Switzerland 48.67 51.33 Soviet Union 46.59 53.03 United States 48.58 51.42 THE WILLINGNESS OF WOMEN The presence of a greater number of women in a society is not the only prerequisite for polygamy. It is, in addition, compulsory that the woman who is the object of the man’s choice should be willing to enter into the married state. This willingness on the woman’s part is a must before a marriage can be lawful in Islam. It is unlawful to marry a woman by force. There is no example in the history of Islam where a man has been allowed to force a woman into marriage. The Prophet Muhammad’s own view that “an unmarried girl should not be married until her permission has been taken”6 had been recorded by both Bukhari and Muslim. ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abbas, one of the Prophet’s Companions and a commentator on the Qur’an, narrates the story of a girl who came to the Prophet complaining that her father had her married off against her wishes. The Prophet gave her the choice of either remaining within the bonds of