Marriage and foreplay Sharia-style

Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the good men are married. But in The Men with Many Wives (Channel 4, Wednesday) this came with a twist: it turned out to be precisely the reason why you should marry them too. Polygamy may be illegal in Britain, but it’s permitted under the Sharia law that many Muslims here apparently live by — and, as several of the programme’s participants told us, there’s no better guide to whether a man is husband material than the fact that he’s a husband already.

Take Nabilah, who came to Britain from Malaysia to do a PhD in engineering at Cambridge. By then she was divorced and wanted someone with a proven track record of staying with his spouse. She therefore abandoned her studies to become the second wife of Hasan, a Jamaican from Brixton who’d converted to Islam at 16 and who now proved an unfailingly genial guide to the whole polygamy business, including the need to divide your time scrupulously between any wives you might have.