Why Polygamy Is Superior to Monogamy: Al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī’s Response to Islamic Modernism

The genre of Islamic juristic opinions ( fatāwā or nawāzil ) provides a fascinating window into how Muslim jurists—both medieval and modern—have applied theoretical sharī‘a guidelines to actual problems facing their communities. Because Muslim practitioners have historically sought fatāwā (sing. fatwā ) on matters ranging from the legal to the ethical to the ritual, these juristic opinions allow us to trace not only the concerns of believers in different Muslim societies over time, but also the moral imagination of the jurists as they grappled with those concerns. In this article, I present a close reading of a fatwā by the late modern Moroccan jurist al-Mahdī b. Muḥammad al-Wazzānī (1849–1923 1 ) on the moral value of polygamy versus monogamy. I show how his legal opinion can be fruitfully read in the context of larger debates across the Middle East and Muslim societies over marriage law and ethics. I suggest that al-Wazzānī’s fatwā represents a traditionalist reaction to the wave of modernist-feminist religious reform that was sweeping through the region at the turn of and into the twentieth century, and that sought to discredit the traditional Islamic practice of polygamy in favor of monogamy.