'Crazy women' angered by polygamy are sinners, says Saudi cleric

Women who are angered when their husbands take on a second, third or fourth wife are sinning according to a Saudi cleric.

Saudi cleric Abdullah al-Mutlaq who is an advisor to the kingdom's royal court made his outrageous comment after he was asked what could be done to deal with the “spinsterhood crisis”.

His solution? Not only for more men to take more than one wife, but for women to help each other out by not getting upset when a man chooses to take more than one wife.

“We always hear about women finding out her husband got married and she goes crazy. She turns psychotic,” he said on state TV.

“This my brothers, is haram (forbidden in Islam)”.

He then gave his male listeners an age old solution for when their wives get upset at the thought of polygamy: “Just divorce her. Men love peace.”

Al-Mutlaq also used his own personal experience in the TV show, explaining how the interaction between his own wives proves how “women curse each other”.

“At one point I divorced my third wife and I wanted her back,” he explained.

“When my second wife found out, she was annoyed and wanted to know what it is I wanted from her.”

“This just proves how women curse each other. They don’t want each other to thrive,” he outrageously claimed.

Al-Mutlaq then went on to advise women to not only accept their husband's new wife, but also pray for them.

This is not the first time people in Saudi Arabia have suggested that “curing spinsterhood” can be done with polygamy.

Last year, Saudi women hit back after a hashtag which translates to “multiple wives cures spinsterhood” called for men to marry more than one woman in order to stop the “epidemic” in the rise of young women not getting married.

A course was even created for women who found it difficult to accept their fate as a second wife.

UAE based psychologist last year Zahraa al-Musawi developed a programme to help women accept being a second wife, comparing a woman who is angry when a man marries another to a first-born feeling left out when a new sibling is born.

She conducted a study to figure out why women resist their husbands marrying second, third or fourth wives, initially putting it down to jealousy. In the study, she acknowledges that a man marrying another woman would lead to anxiety, depression and anger.

Her study emphasised the analogy of a married woman being like a child; she craves attention from her husband the way a child craves attention from their parents. If a new wife is in the picture, like a child who had a new sibling, she will suffer from withdrawal symptoms, which will leave her depressed, according to al-Musawi's research.

Her solution was to teach women to "accept" the situation, and understand that her husband has every right to marry another woman.

Al-Musawi created a five-stage programme, all of which is supposed to counsel a woman and train her into "loving herself enough to submit to the situation”.