Woman in Islamic Shari‘ah
8. Polygamy and Islam
~ 183 ~
civilians killed were also men. In the Second World
War (1939-45) about 60 million people were either
killed or maimed for life, most of them men. In the
Iraq-Iran war alone (1979-1988), 82,000 Iranian
women and about 100,000 Iraqi women were
widowed. All in the space of ten years.
Another drain on the availability of men in society
is imprisonment. In the U.S., the most civilized
society of modern times, no less than 1,300,000
people are convicted daily for one crime of another.
A number of them — 97% of whom are men — are
obliged to serve lengthy prison sentences.
152
151.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1984), vol. 7, p. 37.
152. Ibid, vol 14, p. 1102.
The modern industrial system too is responsible for
the lower proportion of men in society, death by
accident having become a matter of daily routine in
present times. There is no country in which
accidents do not take place every day on the streets,
in the factories and wherever sophisticated, heavy
machinery is handled by human beings. In this
modern industrial age, such accidents are so much
