Tariq Nelson

I found an article written last winter by Martin Walker on France’s Black Muslim population in the aftermath of the riots that could give us a terrifying peek into the future of African American Muslims in this country, if steps are not taken to change things now. And certainly Allah knows best. 

Here are some excerpts:

One of the striking features of the two weeks of rage that swept France is that so many of the rioters are black rather than Arab, though North Africans from Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia make up more than two-thirds of the estimated 6 million immigrants, their families included, in France.

Olivier Roy, director of studies at the Advanced School of Social Science Studies said in the article:

The riots might have been easier to control if they had been Islamic in origin, Roy suggests, because then the French authorities might have been able to calm matters by appealing to and working with local religious leaders. As it is, they try to enlist the cooperation of local community leaders, in places whereRoy says ‘there is no community’  ‘Traditional parental control has disappeared, along with the traditional family. Many Muslim households are headed by a single parent. Elders, imams, teachers and social workers have lost control,’Roy argues.  Experts who work with France’s black community point to a different kind of family breakdown. Sonia Imloul of Respect 93, a non-governmental organization, says one of the biggest problems is polygamy, and cites the example of one family she knows with one father, four wives and thirty children, all living in the same standard 4-room apartment of French public housing.  Further, I found an article that states that in France between 150,000 - 400,000 live in polygamous households. This is a carryover from the fact that polygyny is much more common in West African Muslim countries than in the rest of the Muslim world. Why would this be?

At least part of the answer may be in the fact that some 80% of the workforce in Sub-Saharan Africa are women. In much of sub-saharan Africa, Muslim and non-Muslim, it is the mother’s job to earn enough to feed her children and not the man’s. So when you have a situation where the women are working, and/or providing for her own upkeep, it is much easier to have more than one wife. This could be the main reason why other Muslim cultures do not practice polgyny as much as Sub-Saharan Africans do. 

Let me clarify here. The problem is not polygyny as these articles state. The abuse of it is the problem. Similar to African Muslims in France, a number of African American Muslim males in larger cities have also been known to marry multiple wives while having no real ability to care for them or the children. Some even have no steady employment.

Again, how do they pull it off? They do it by either putting them all on welfare, or by marrying sisters that have established stable homes for themselves via their careers and mooch off of them, or some combination of the two. This does not make polgyny a bad thing, because when a man can take care of his families, then it can be a very good thing. But abuse of it can be disastrous. It certainly has been in France with the black African Muslims. And it could be even more disasterous for African American Muslims that are following the same path. Why? Because unlike the African French Muslims, the African American Muslims are a population within a sea of non-Muslim African Americans, and have the potential of melting back into the general African American population as NON-MUSLIMS.

The point here is not about the irresponsbile polygyny as it is, once again about where a lack of education and paternal investment in children leads.May Allah help us.