When people hear the word polygamy, most of them think of one thing only: a Muslim man married to four wives.
But polygamy has many faces today. And if we are honest, the West has its own version — only it does not call it marriage.
Let me explain what I have observed.
1. The Classic Muslim Polygyny
In Islam, polygyny is permitted — one man, up to four wives — with a very strict condition: justice. If you cannot be just, marry only one. Polygyny or monogamy, the rule is the same: financial capability is a prerequisite; otherwise, fast.
That is the theory. The practice today is different.
In Turkey, a Muslim country, you cannot practice polygyny officially at all. The law is monogamy. To marry a second wife officially, you must first divorce the first one. So there is no legal polygyny. If you marry a second one unofficially, she cannot inherit from you. Case closed!
In Malaysia, the law allows it, but you need the consent of the first wife. In practice, that consent is almost impossible to obtain. Many men try; many fail.
In Egypt, the law allows it, but the culture does not. The moment many men marry a second wife, the first wife leaves. She packs and goes for good. So the man ends up with one wife again, only with a broken home behind him.
In the Middle East— Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen — and North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, etc.), polygyny is legal, but it is now rarely practiced. Cost of living and social pressure. The younger generation is mostly choosing one wife.
In Pakistan, even if the law allows it, you face strong opposition — sometimes even from your own family. It is rarely practiced.
In India, it is almost non-existent. The Hindu practice is monogamy, and that is the law and the culture which has influenced the Indian Muslims and Pakistanis also. Many Indian Muslims have never seen a polygynous family in real life. Dr. Zakir Naik, an Indian himself, once said he has never seen a polygynous family.
And we all remember the famous case of Dharmendra (Dram), the strong, famous Hindu actor, who converted to Islam just to marry Hema Malini as a second wife, because Hindu law would not allow him to marry her while still married to his first wife. That tells you how difficult it has become.
So the classic polygyny is still in the books, but in practice, it is shrinking in most Muslim nations but expanding in Nigeria. No wonder our population is increasing significantly — and by 2050, Nigeria will become the 3rd most populous country in the world.
2. The Modern Western Polygamy
Now let us look at the West, especially the US.
The West has largely abandoned the marriage system in favour of the couple system — without any legal implications.
What do I mean? A man and a woman can live together for 10 years, have children, share a house, share money, and never go to court or church to marry. They are a couple, not husband and wife. If they separate, there is no divorce. There is no legal process. They just pack and leave.
And inside that couple system, and sometimes even inside the marital system, we now have three new faces of polygamy in which mutual consent dictates the rule:
Open Relationship
A couple agrees that one or both can sleep around outside with anyone, but not love outside. The primary couple remains central. Sleeping around is allowed; falling in love is not. But there is a rule: you don't have to tell your partner who you slept with, and your partner doesn't have to meet that person. It is separate. It is private. What happens outside stays outside. Married couple Will Smith and Jada are suspected to be in an open relationship.
That "In an open relationship" on Facebook profile relationship status is not a mistake. It is not "my account is open." It is not "I am open to dating." It means: I am in a relationship, but we have agreed that we can also have other romantic partners.
Many of our people choose it wrongly, mistaking what open means. They see "In an open relationship" on Facebook and they think it means "I am open to new relationship." Or "My account is open." Or "I am free, come and talk to me."
They do not know it means: I already have a partner or spouse, but we have agreed to be with other people.
Swinging
Couples, married or not, exchange partners together, as a recreational activity. They may do it as a team, in the same room, at the same party. Emotional exclusivity remains. It is a romantic adventure, not love.
Wuddadu: Busted Nigerian pseudo-swingers in Azare, Bauchi
In May 2026, Hisbah in Azare, Katagum LGA, Bauchi State, busted seven members of a group called Wuddadu for wife-swapping. They were exchanging wives among themselves, claiming one of them had a dream that endorsed it.
The group leader disowned them, saying it was not their teaching. The women said they only agreed because their husbands told them it was normal. The suspects later showed remorse and promised to stop.
This is pseudo-swinging in Nigerian form — not open, not recreational, not by free consent, but done in secret and hidden behind religion.
'Cire Gashin Minkiri'
There is another thing people used to talk about in the North, called 'cire gashin minkiri', i.e., removal of the evil hair.
It was said that a muridi (sect follower) would send his own wife to his visiting leader, so that the leader would sleep with her and, by that, remove the evil hair (gashin minkiri) from her. The belief was that the woman had a spiritual problem, and only the leader's intimacy could cleanse her. He was the only one who knew where that hair was.
It was swinging for spiritual cleansing and honoring the sect’s leader. The husband was not sharing his wife because he wanted fun. He was giving her away because he believed his leader had spiritual power to locate the evil hair and remove it.
I do not think this happens now. At least, I have not heard of it happening in recent times. But the story remains, and it shows how the same act — a man giving his wife to another man — can be dressed up in different clothes: in the West, as freedom; in Bauchi, as a dream; here, as spiritual cleansing. The name changes. The act remains similar.
Polyamory
This is the most complete form. Multiple romantic, loving relationships at the same time, with the consent of everyone. Love is allowed to be plural. A person can have two partners, wives or husbands; both know each other, both are loved. Sometimes they live and sleep together in the same bed, sometimes they share finances, sometimes they raise children together.
These are not secret affairs. They are open, discussed, agreed. There are many short documentaries about them. When someone says, “I am poly”, then that is what he or she means. They are Western polygamy, but without the name marriage, and without the legal responsibility that comes with marriage.
3. Where Does Queer and Fluid Come In?
This is where it becomes even more complicated. Western polygamies are closely related to queer and fluid sexual orientations. Because once you remove the idea of classic monogamy, that marriage is between one man and one woman for life, you open the door to many other forms.
Fluid means: I am not fixed. Today I may love a man, tomorrow a woman, tomorrow both, tomorrow neither. Queer means: I do not fit into the old categories of straight or gay. I am something else, a true definition of sexual inconsistency and uncertainty.
So in the West today, you can have a polyamorous triad of two women and one man. Or two men and one woman. Or three women. Or a couple where one partner identifies as non-binary. The structure is not based on religion or law. It is based on feeling, consent, and identity. Nasara uban asara!
In Islam, polygyny is structured: one man, up to four women, with rights, with maintenance, with inheritance, with responsibility. In the West, polyamory is unstructured: any gender, any number, any combination, with no legal obligation. If it ends, it ends. That is the biggest difference.
4. The Age Question — Marriage and Consent
We cannot discuss this without discussing age. In Islam, marriage could be tied to puberty, like the beginning of menses, and maturity, and to the consent of the girl’s guardians and the girl herself. Some Muslim countries use 18 years as the minimum age of marital consent, while other countries do not tie marital consent to any minimum age limit.
In the West, there are two different ages: age of sexual consent, and age of marital consent — and they are often different.
In America, the age of sexual consent is 16 to 18 depending on the state, but you cannot marry until 18 in most states without parental consent, and in some states you cannot marry until 18 at all. So, by and large, 18 is usually the age of marital consent.
In the UK, the age of sexual consent is 16, but marriage is 18. In France, sexual consent is 15, marriage is 18. In Germany, sexual consent is 14 with conditions, 16 generally, but marriage is 18. In China, sexual consent is 14, marriage is 22 for men and 20 for women — one of the highest in the world.
Here is that point inserted, in your voice, for the Nigeria section:
Of particular note is Nigeria.
The age of sexual consent in Nigeria is 14 years. Meaning, any consensual coitus outside marriage below that age is classified as rape in our laws.
If a girl is 14 and has consensual coitus outside marriage, what happens depends on the applicable law — the Penal Code or Shari’ah Law in the North, or the Criminal Code in the South.
That is the confusion we live in now. We have stopped marrying our daughters at 12 to 14, but we have not stopped them from being exposed at 14 to 20. We have protected them from early marriage, but we have not protected them from early coitus.
Hisba can arrest. The law can punish. But the phone has already taught them that romance is normal, marriage is old-fashioned, and consent is enough.
So a 16-year-old girl in the West can legally sleep around with anyone with her consent, but she cannot legally marry. The system separates coitus from marriage. Coitus is allowed early, marriage is delayed late.
If you can sleep around with whoever you want, with the person's consent, and nobody will arrest you, nobody will shame you — then what is marriage for?
If you can live together as a couple just like husband and wife once you are both 18, cook together, sleep together, raise children together, without any paper, without any wedding — then why bother about marriage?
And if you do marry, and it ends, the court could take away about 50% of the man's wealth in a divorce settlement. Half of what he worked for, gone. Just like that.
So the Western man asks himself: Why should I marry? To lose my freedom and to risk losing half my property? If I can get everything marriage gives — coitus, companionship, children, a home — without marrying, why should I sign a paper that only puts me at risk?
That is why marriage is dying there. Not because people don't love each other. But because marriage no longer gives them anything they cannot already get for free, while it takes away so much if it fails.
Yes, that is another sign of the change.
Even the language has changed.
In the old West, a child born outside marriage was called a bastard or an *illegitimate child. The word itself was a shame. It told the child: you are not proper. You are not legal. Your father did not marry your mother.
Today, those words are no longer used. They are considered insulting, old-fashioned, cruel.
Now they say: "child born out of wedlock." Or "child born outside marriage." Or simply, "my child." No difference. No shame. No label.
A child is a child, whether the parents are married or not. Whether the father is known or not. Whether the mother was a wife, a girlfriend, or a one-night partner.
That is why marriage is no longer important for children either. In the past, you married so that your child would be legitimate. Today, legitimacy does not matter. The law gives the child the same rights. Society gives the child the same respect. So one more reason for marriage has disappeared.
In the Muslim system, the opposite was intended: coitus is only inside marriage, so marriage should come early to protect from coitus outside. But today, with education, with the economy, with modern life, marriage is also being delayed in Muslim countries — to 25, 30, 40 — while puberty comes at 12, 13 and the urge for intimacy peaks around 15 - 18. That gap is creating a new crisis we have not solved.
While our mothers were married off at around 12 to 14, this early marriage hardly happens now, especially in the cities. The culture has changed. The thinking has changed. A girl of 12 is now seen as a child, not a wife.
But something else has taken its place.
Romantic relationships, open cuddling and caressing between boys and girls of 15 to 20 years old, have now become something normal on social media. They post it. They film it. They show it to the world without shame, while dressed in Hijabs. What used to be hidden is now content.
Hisba, from various Northern states, is trying its best to curb such immoral behaviours. But it is fighting social media, and social media is faster than Hisba.
Many people blame this new openness on people like Soja Boy from Sokoto — who had been romancing white women openly in a reality show filmed in Nigeria and Tanzania, and has now brought that same style into the Hausa-phone media space. Whether he started it or not, he has made it popular with his famous song, which he wanted to release in Ramadan 2025, but postponed it when people shouted about it. Young boys and girls now copy what they see him do, and they call it love, content creation, and a need to trend and go viral overnight and become famous.
So early marriage has gone down. But early romance and even coitus outside marriage have gone up. We did not stop the boy and girl from meeting. We only stopped them from marrying. And now they meet without marriage, in front of the camera.
Conclusion
Polygamy did not die. It changed its clothes.
In Muslim countries, polygyny is becoming difficult — by law, by consent, by culture, by cost. A man who wants a second wife must now ask permission, face the court, face his first wife, face his pocket, and face society. Many simply give up.
In Western countries, polygamy is growing — but under new names: open, swinging, polyamorous, queer, fluid. Without marriage, without law, without responsibility, only mutual consent.
And now we see the same clothes being worn in Nigeria too by Wuddadu sect followers and in the past, ‘cire gashin minkiri’.
At the same time, marriage itself is losing its meaning in the West.
And in our own cities, we have made the same trade without knowing it. Women now openly beat their chests and say marriage is not compulsory. Feminist ideology has been crawling into our girls’ minds knowingly or ignorantly, and they have been spreading it everywhere. Materialism has taken center stage. Our people will do anything for money.
So we are all moving in the same direction, from different sides. One system has law but no practice. The other system has practice but no law.
One system once protected the woman by marriage, but now leaves the girl to romance without marriage. The other system once shamed the child born outside marriage, but now calls every child equal, while removing the father from responsibility.
The question we must ask ourselves is not: which one is trending? The question is: which one protects the woman, protects the child, and protects the family?
Because in the end, marriage is not about coitus. Marriage is about responsibility.
And any system — old or new, Eastern or Western, Bauchi or London, Hausa or American — that removes responsibility from love will eventually produce broken hearts, broken homes, and broken children.
That is what my curiosity has taught me.
