The bearded clerics of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology, the advisory body that determines whether the country’s laws are in accordance with Islam, have been extremely busy this year. Central to their preoccupations has been the issue of marriage; in March they ruled that existing legislation requiring a man to obtain written permission from existing wives before marrying another were un-Islamic and needed to be amended. Then in May they announced that laws prohibiting the marriage of minors were also un-Islamic. Puberty, not age, determines eligibility for marriage, said Maulana Muhammad Khan Sheerani, the Chairman of the Council, clarifying that legal contracts for marriage could be completed by guardians for minors, while consummation could wait until after puberty.

On Tuesday, after the Council's latest conclave, came another bombshell. Polygamy, said Sheerani, could not be a condition for which a woman could petition for divorce. The sum of all the Council’s rulings, if legislated, would mean that a Pakistani man could marry a second, third, or fourth wife without the permission of existing ones, who could not petition for divorce for this reason. If the pronouncements regarding child marriage are added to the mix, these subsequent wives could be as young as twelve or 13 years old.

None of these proposed amendments have not yet been taken up by the National Assembly of Pakistan, a step necessary for enactment. However, the pronouncements of the Council usually pave the way for legislative amendments. The slogan of bringing the country in line with Islam has legitimized many a military dictator and unpopular prime minister. Taking up the proverbial mantle of purifying marriage laws by eliminating all possibilities of women making choices or exercising rights could indeed rescue the currently beleaguered Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, rendering him a religiously anointed hero.

However, to imagine the battle lines over marriage in Pakistan to be clearly drawn between Islamist clerics who insist on archaic and misogynistic interpretations of religion and their liberal opponents would be a mistake and would ignore that even the most liberal of Pakistani men are products, and at least passive fans of, their patriarchal society and its polygamous permissions.

The story of the genesis of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, Pakistan’s first marriage legislation, is instructive in this regard. It begins, ironically, in the United States not long after Pakistan’s birth in 1947. Pakistan’s urbane and charismatic ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Ali Bogra, fell for his social secretary, Aliya Saadi. The besotted Bogra was married, but it soon dawned on him that now that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan existed, marrying more than one woman was not a problem. In an interview to an American newspaper, he suggested that polygamy was an antidote to the Western custom of divorce.