It is seen by some women as a technologically convenient way to find a “part-time” husband. But the appeal of secondwife.com is driven by men drawn to the “Muslim polygamy matchmaking” site, as its British founder boasts that it has more than 100,000 users, a quarter of them in the UK.
There have been calls for the website to be shut down for treating women like “ornaments” to be collected. An MP, a Muslim women’s rights campaigner and a prominent Islamic scholar raised concerns yesterday that it was encouraging a practice that can leave women with no legal rights.
It is illegal to be married to more than one person in the UK but bigamy legislation does not cover religious marriages unless they are separately registered under civil law. Islam allows men to take several wives, though only if they “deal justly” with each of them, but a woman may not take more than one husband.
Azad Chaiwala, 34, from Sunderland, founded secondwife.com in 2014 and has claimed that it helps to build “bigger and better families”. A second marriage is more “honourable” than having affairs or using prostitutes, he says, while polygamy is “more in tune with nature” than monogamy. [The Times (£)] Read more
