Turkish man wants to trade in 5 wives

By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune

Published: July 6, 2006

ISIKLAR, Turkey With his five wives, 55 children, 80 grandchildren, 400 sheep, 500 hectares of land and small army of servants, Aga Mehmet Arslan would seem an unlikely defender of monogamy.

Yet if he were young again, the sprightly, pot-bellied, 64-year-old Kurdish village chieftain says, he would happily trade in his five wives for one.

"Marrying five wives is not sinful, and I did so because to have many wives is a sign of power," says Arslan, perched on a divan in a large cushion- filled room at his house, where a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who outlawed polygamy in 1926, is prominently displayed.

"But I wouldn't do it again," he adds, listing the challenges of so many kin, like building each wife a house far from the others to prevent them from competing and struggling to remember all of his children's names. "I was uneducated back then, and Allah commands us to be fruitful and multiply."

Banned by Ataturk as part of an effort to modernize the Turkish republic and empower women, polygamy remains widespread in this deeply religious and rural Kurdish region of southeastern Anatolia, home to one- third of Turkey's 71 million people. The practice is generally accepted under the Koran.

The prevalence of polygamy is creating culture clashes in a country struggling to reconcile the secularism of the republic with its Muslim traditions. It also risks undermining Turkey's drive to gain entry into the European Union, which has condemned the practice.