For These Muslims, Polygamy Is An Option

Pauline Bartolone San Franscisco Chronicle US

Clad in his Sunday sweatpants and a long blue Pakistani-style shirt, Ali, a 59-year old African American Muslim elder, popped in a DVD of "Big Love" - the HBO series about Mormon polygamists in Utah.

"Dude's not handling this well at all," he says as he watches Bill Paxton play an overburdened husband with three wives. "You know, I feel sorry for dude."

Ali - who prefers to only use his first name - faces the challenges of polygamy every day. For 10 years, he's been religiously married to two women, and lives with them under one roof in a working-class neighborhood of San Diego. Tuesday through Thursday he sleeps with his wife Hasanah on the first floor, then Saturday through Monday it's upstairs with his second wife Asiila. That leaves his office, cluttered with photocopies of Quranic sayings and dusty pictures of relatives in hijab, as his only private room in the house.

This San Diego family's life is part of a small but increasingly visible phenomenon of African American Muslims practicing polygamy....

She says that a shortage of marriageable black Muslim men may be one reason polygamy is embraced.

"With the high number of African American men in prison, on drugs, out of work, or unavailable in some other way ... the options are limited," Majeed said.

African Americans are not the only Muslims who practice polygamy. Plural marriages exist in majority Muslim populations of Africa and the Persian Gulf states, and immigrants continue the practice in the United States.

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This story is one part of a larger "News 21" reporting project at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. To see more stories on "God, Sex and Family," go to www.newsinitiative.org/ucb. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.