An image of a man sitting with four burqa-clad women is being circulated on social media with claims that the man from Saudi Arabia married a principal, a teacher, a supervisor, and a student from the same school.
An X user, Raghu (@IndiaTales7), posted this picture on February 12, 2025, with the caption “Some Crazy Images from the Past”, and created a thread with 26 other pictures with separate explanatory captions. This particular photo topped the list. (archive)
Some Crazy images from the Past.🧵
— Raghu (@IndiaTales7) February 12, 2025
The post has garnered over 6 million views so far.
On January 4, 2025, X user The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues), which shares misinformation and communal propaganda on a regular basis, shared the same image on X and Facebook along with a caption, “Islam For You!!” (archive)
Islam For You!! pic.twitter.com/5D6ivJNpDq
— The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues) January 4, 2025
The X post has almost 1 Lakh views.
Several other social media users have shared the image along with the claim.
Fact Check
A closer look at the image reveals certain discrepancies in the picture. The eyes of both the women on the man’s left seem/ appear unnatural to say the least, with their line of sight defocused and distorted.
The hands of at least four of the five individuals, and the fingers in particular, are distorted in the image.
Readers should note that distorted fingers is an error typical of AI-generated images.
Next, we used Sightengine, an AI image detector tool, to verify the photo. It showed a 99% possibility of the image being AI-generated.
We tried a few other AI-detection tools such as Hive Moderation, Brandwell , Google Detect AI images, and aiimagedetector.org. All of them showed high probability that the image was not authentic and likely to be AI-generated.
Now, to verify the authenticity of the claim, we performed a relevant keyword search that led us to several news articles, like the Saudi Gazette, Hurriyet Daily News and more back from the year 2012. The Independent published an article on November 21, 2012, wrote that a 50-year-old man from Saudi had made a bizarre decision and married a pupil, a teacher, and the principal all from the same school. He also has a fourth wife, who worked as an educational supervisor, mostly supervising the school that her husband’s other wives attended and worked at.
According to Alarabiya, the school teacher, one of the wives, told newspaper Okaz that the way she interacted with her husband’s other wives at work was “no different” to how she treated other students and superiors.
To sum up, the claim that a Saudi man married a student, a teacher and the principal, all from the same school and, has a fourth wife who was an educational supervisor is true, but not a recent incident. This happened around 12 years ago, in 2012. The image that is being circulated along with this claim is inauthentic and AI-generated.
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