Woman Between Islam and Western Society
7. Polygamy and Islam
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Most of the 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 or another.
A number of them — 97% of whom are men — are
obliged to serve lengthy prison sentences.
3
The modem 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 on the increase that a
whole new discipline has come into being —
