Farzana is a senior nurse, 36, attractive, self-possessed and articulate. “I have begun to consider polygamy,” she tells me at a matchmaking event in central London for divorced and widowed Muslims who are interested in marrying again. “When you think about love in an Islamic way, the co-wife idea makes sense.”

According to Mizan Raja, who set up the Islamic Circles community network and presides over the east London Muslim matrimonial scene, women are increasingly electing to become “co-wives” — in other words, to become a man’s second or third wife.

As I reported last year in the New Statesman, Raja gets between 5 and 10 requests every week from women who are “comfortable with the notion of a part-time man”. He explains: “Career women