There is not only the lack of a minimum age for marriage in the Qur'an, but also the permission for child marriage implied by the permission granted to divorce prepubescent girls (Qur'an 65:4), and of course, Muhammad's own example in marrying Aisha at the age of 6 and consummating the marriage when she was 9. And here is a detailed story of the human cost of the practice made sacrosanct by Muhammad's example (Qur'an 33:21).
"Broken lives: Nigeria's child brides who end up on the streets," by Ramita Navai for the Times Online, November 28:
In a small, dimly lit brothel in the red-light district of Kano in northern Nigeria nearly all the young prostitutes lined up on plastic chairs are runaway brides.
“I was married when I was 15 years old. I was forced into it,” said Hadiza.
Whenever her husband attempted to consummate the marriage, Hadiza would flee to her parents’ home, but they kept returning her to the man to whom she had been married off.
Finally her husband raped her: the attack was so violent that Hadiza was sent to hospital.
“We have no choice. If you’re not married by the time you’re 16, people think there must be something wrong with you,” she said. The girls around her nod silently - some of them had been forced to marry when they were only 12.
Northern Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world: nearly half of all girls here are married by the age of 15.
The consequences have been devastating. Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality rate in Africa and one of the world’s highest rates of fistula, a condition that can occur when the pressure of childbirth tears a hole between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Many women are left incontinent for life. Up to 800,000 women suffer from fistula in Nigeria.
“They marry young, they get pregnant young, they deliver young and they pick up the fistula,” said Kees Waaldijk, the chief consultant surgeon at the Babbar Ruga hospital, the world’s largest fistula clinic, in the northern state of Katsina.
Most cases happen to young girls during their first pregnancy, and nearly half the patients at Babbar Ruga are under 16. [...]
The Nigerian federal Government has attempted to outlaw child marriage. In 2003 it passed the Child Rights Act, prohibiting marriage under the age of 18. In the Muslim northern states, though, there has been fierce resistance to the Act, with many people portraying it as antiIslamic. “Child marriage in Islam is permissible. In the Koran there is no specific age of marriage,” said Imam Sani, a liberal cleric in the northern state of Kaduna. He said that this was the root cause of the opposition among the more hardline mullahs, who believe that matters of Islamic “personal” law - marriage, divorce and inheritance - must be governed by the Koran, not the state.
“The Muslim clerics have a problem with this Child Rights Act and they decried it, they castigate it, they reject it and they don’t want it introduced in Nigeria,” Mr Sani said.
He said there would be serious repercussions if the federal Government attempted to impose a minimum age of marriage. “There will be violent conflict from the Muslims, saying that ‘no, we will not accept this, we’d rather die than accept something which is not a law from Allah’.”
Half of Nigeria’s 36 states have passed the Act, but it has been adopted by only one of the dozen Muslim states - and even that one made a crucial amendment substituting the age of 18 for the term “puberty”.
Each state in Nigeria has the constitutional right to amend legislation to comply with its local traditions and religion, meaning that central government is powerless to impose a minimum age of marriage.
Other vocal opponents to the Act include village heads and elders - almost all men - highlighting the tribal and cultural constraints that hamper attempts to stamp out child marriage.
“It is important we have the right to marry our girls young so there is no risk of pregnancy outside marriage. It is to preserve the purity of our girls,” said Usman, an 84-year-old man from the village of Yammaw Fulani, who married a 14-year-old girl four years ago. “We will never accept this law,” he said.
What this article doesn't mention is that when a child-wife gets a fistula, she is thrown away by her husband and completely rejected by her Muslim birth-"family."
She starves and dies, unless she is fortunate enough to find a non-Muslim agency that will feed her and fix her fistula. That's Muslim family values, friends.
In the meantime, Muslimahmediawatch.com fusses over the Western "male gaze," "colonialism," and the specificity of oppression, all without mentioning the nasty bits of the Koran and the hadith about women. (It's the My Personal Islam phenomenon -- the fruity, flowery, indefinite "garment" nonsense overcoming everything else).
I can't tell you the depth of the contempt and pity I have for muslimahs after exhaustively reading their own sites.
Islam destroys life in more ways than just the gun...
http://justifythis.blogspot.com/2006/05/pervert-prophet_12.html
"Religiously" sanctioned pedophilia.
The thought of that 84 year old goat pawing at his 14 year old bride is sickening.
we’d rather die than accept something which is not a law from Allah’
I'd love to see that.
Mulsim allowed child sex abuse.
He's 84. How many girls has he already married and divorced?
The reporters don't ask. Has he tossed out others? What happens to the child bride when the old groom dies? And his children?
Among the causes of fistulae, there is also malnourishment. Malnourishment also causes the extremely disfiguring disease noma. Northern Nigeria is part of the noma belt.
“It is important we have the right to marry our girls young so there is no risk of pregnancy outside marriage. It is to preserve the purity of our girls,” said Usman, an 84-year-old man from the village of Yammaw Fulani, who married a 14-year-old girl four years ago. “We will never accept this law,” he said.
You don't have to accept it, you pervert, you just have to obey it.
And don't forget that fistulas are caused not only by having babies too young for biology to allow for it without permanent damage, but by female genital mutilation. Wait. Wasn't the whole point of fgm to keep girls "pure?" So they should either do fgm or have child marriage, but not both. One precludes the "need" for the other. Or they could just be decent, tolerable human beings and outlaw both like civilized nations.
What a bunch of perverts.
jdamn:
Dream on. Civilized behavior will come to the arabic world only long after mein koranf has been discarded and forgotten. Don't hold your breath.
Suprkufr, many Nigerians are very civilized, good people. I used to live with one. Her father died when she was 11 and her mother escaped with her two daughters so as to avoid having to sell her daughters into "marriage" and having to marry someone she didn't love. They were Ibo (Christian), though. She was one of the best friends I made my freshman year of college. She had a British boyfriend and they were a riot together. Nigeria is one of those nations which, sadly, is quickly becoming Islamized. It had a negligible Muslim (Hausa) population 30 years ago. They're still a minority. Nigeria should serve as a shining example of what happens to a nation which has a sizeable Muslim minority. They will soon be partitioned, I would imagine, as the Hausa have isolated themselves in the north. But Europe's not paying attention. We should airdrop 'America Alone at the End of the World' all over Wetsern Europe.
Jdamn wrote:
And don't forget that fistulas are caused not only by having babies too young for biology to allow for it without permanent damage, but by female genital mutilation.
....................
Good point, Jdamn. Fistulas do happen in women who haven't been subjected to FGM, but they are extremely rare.
FGM--especially the more extreme varieties which include infibulation, guarantee painful and dangerous sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth. Most fistula hospitals have been set up by charitable Infidels, not Muslims.
Tragically, most of the time, doctors have to agree to re-infibulate their patients, even though it is such a barbaric practice. If they don't, the husband and his family rarely accept the woman back.