THE INEQUALITY IN NUMBERS

Records show that male and female births are almost equal in number. However, a study of mortality shows that the rate is higher for men than for women. This disparity is evident from early childhood to extreme old age. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “In general, the risk of death at any given age is less for females than for males.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), Vol. 7, p. 37)

The proportionately higher numbers of women in society can be traced to various causes. For instance, when war breaks out, most casualties are men. In the First World War (1914-18), about 8 million soldiers were killed. 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 US, 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. (Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), Vol. 14, p. 1102).

The modern industrial system, too, is responsible for the lower proportion of men in society; death by accident has become a matter of daily routine in present times. There is no country where accidents do not occur daily on the streets, in factories, or wherever human beings handle sophisticated, heavy machinery. In this modern industrial age, such accidents are increasing, so much so that a new discipline has become safety engineering. According to data collected in 1967, in that year, a total of 175,000 people died as a result of accidents in 50 different countries. Most of these were men. (Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), Vol. 16, p. 137)

Despite safety engineering, casualties from industrial accidents have increased. For instance, the number of air accidents in 1988 was higher than ever. Similarly, experimentation in arsenals continues to kill people in all industrialized countries, but the death toll is never made public. Here again, it is men who have the highest casualty rate.

For reasons of this nature, women continue to outnumber men. This difference persists in even the most developed societies, e.g., in America. According to data collected in 1967, there were nearly 7,100,000 more women than men. This means that even if every man in America got married, 7,100,000 women would be left without husbands.

The following figures taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984) show the ratio of men to women in several Western countries:

            Country                   Male(%)                   Female(%) 

Austria                      47.7                           52.93

Burma                       48.81                         51.19

Germany                  48.02                         51.89

France                       48.99                         51.01

Italy                            48.89                         51.01

Poland                       48.61                         51.30

Spain                          48.94                         51.06

Switzerland              48.67                         51.33

Soviet Union           46.59                         53.03

United States         48.58                         51.42

From the above data, it is seen that the ratio of women is more than that of men. When there is a disparity between the number of men and women in society, instead of choosing sexual anarchy, Islam gives the exceptional commandment of taking more than one wife. While the natural way of marriage is between one man and one woman, the way of monogamy, while polygamy is permitted in exceptional circumstances by the law of necessity. It should be emphasized that exceptional laws are exceptional laws, and they cannot be applied in general.