Wikipedia is really funny, I mean, what you stumble upon…Nikah Ijtimah “is a form of polyandry that existed in the Pre-Islamic period in the Arabian peninsula.” I knew of the purported existence of polyandry in pre-Islamic Arabia (see No God but God), but this, I did not know of:
…there were four types of marriage during the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance. One … type of marriage was that a group of less than ten men would assemble and enter upon a women, and all of them would have sexual relations with her. If she became pregnant and delivered a child and some days had passed after her delivery, she would send for all of them and none of them could refuse to come, and when they all gathered before her she would say to them “You (all) know what you have done and now I have given birth to a child. So it is your child O so and so! Naming whoever she liked and her child would follow him and he could not refuse to take him.”
In Mother Nature Sarah Hrdy describes cultures, like the Ache of Paraguay, where partial paternity is accepted. That is, a more than one man might be the potential father, so responsibilities are divided appropriately. Hrdy tells of another case where one group of Yanomamo set upon another. It so happens that the attackers were known to the overwhelmed villagers, and a Brazilian captive recounts the story of a Yanomamo woman pleading for the life of her son by arguing that there is a non-trivial possibility that the child might be the son of one particular warrior who has taken it upon himself to kill the young. The warrior considers the probability, and dismisses it, and immediately kills the child.
In any case, the money shot, I am surprised that I didn’t stumbled upon the fact that Muawiyah I might have been conceived via Nikah Ijtimah. But the might must be emphasized, because Muawiyah is reviled by many Muslims, especially the Shia, for his role in the usurpation of the Caliphate from Ali. With his line, the Umayyads, the history of Islam enters its period of worldly expansion, the great swaths of conquest in the first decades of Islam were due to this Arab Alexander and his successors. If the Shia detest him, the Sunni are not much more favorable, the Umayyads are sometimes termed the “Arab Kingdom” for the non-Islamic character of their rule. To a great extent Muawiyah and his successors left the Hellenistic and Persian substrate untouched, their rule being one of a garrison culture which collected rents from the older civilizations over which they now ruled. The subsequent Abbassid Caliphate which overthrew the Umayyads can be argued to be more fundamentally Islamic. But, it can also be argued that the character of Islam was not fully formed during the late 7th and early 8th centuries, so the attacks against the Umayyads are a combination of history being written by the sycophants of the Abbassids and the natural attenuated nature of Islamic practice during this period.
In any case, I do find it amusing that while many great men like Jesus, the Buddha and Plato were born of virgins, Muawiyah, a man of a different character altogether might have been born of the inverse scenario, a man of many fathers instead of none.
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