Donald Trump just said it on Wednesday: “You know, we blew up the Middle East, and we left. We got nothing out of it except a lot of death.” And a lot of societal upheaval. Trump’s words came a day after another sign of just how disastrous our incursion into Iraq really was: Iraq’s parliament approved a law stipulating that girls as young as nine years old could legally be married. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq generally followed more Western-style civil laws. But those days are long gone.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that “Iraq’s parliament passed three divisive laws Tuesday, including amendments to the country’s personal status law that opponents say would in effect legalize child marriage.” The amendments “would let clerics rule according to their interpretation of Islamic law, which some interpret to allow marriage of girls in their early teens — or as young as 9 under the Jaafari school of Islamic law followed by many Shiite religious authorities in Iraq.” This was done in order to bring the nation’s laws into line with Islam: “Proponents of the changes, which were advocated by primarily conservative Shiite lawmakers, defend them as a means to align the law with Islamic principles and reduce Western influence on Iraqi culture.”
AP says that the approval of child marriage comes from Iraqi clerics’ “interpretation of Islamic law,” but actually, this is not some eccentric interpretation. This is standard, basic Islam. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, and the resultant fact that child marriage and the sexualization of children are taken for granted in wide swaths of the Islamic world: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88). Muhammad was at this time fifty-four years old. Numerous other early Islamic traditions state the same thing.
Marrying young girls was not all that unusual in Muhammad's time. But because, in Islam, Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this even today. For that reason, Iraq is not alone in making Muhammad’s example the basis of their laws regarding the legal marriageable age for girls. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”
According to Amir Taheri in The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (pp. 90-91), Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing” and advised the faithful to give their own daughters away accordingly: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.” When he took power in Iran, he lowered the legal marriageable age of girls to nine, in accord with Muhammad’s example.
And this practice not accepted just in Iraq and Iran. The News Agency of Nigeria reported back in June 2021 that “the Chief Imam of the Nasrul-lahi-li Fathi Society of Nigeria (NASFAT), Abdul Azeez Onike, says Islam supports underage marriage.” Onike insisted that “Islamic scripture was clear about marriage” and called upon people to refer to Islamic texts “instead of using contemporary standards” to determine whether or not child marriage was an acceptable practice.
Onike was right: child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law. Numerous Islamic authorities worldwide attest to this. Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet) said in Jan. 2018 that under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry.
Ishaq Akintola, professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria, has said, “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.” An Iraqi expert on Islamic law, Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi, agrees, saying, “There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”
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So does Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent Muslim cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council: “There is no minimum age for marriage" and girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.” Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology has declared flatly: “Islam does not forbid marriage of young children.”
Yet despite all this, worldwide organizations dedicated to ending child marriage universally fail to acknowledge its justifications in Islam. The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights never mentions Islam in connection with child marriage. UNICEF doesn’t, either. Nor does the international network Girls Not Brides.
Until the root cause of why child marriage continues to be prevalent in some regions is acknowledged, the problem will never be solved. And more girls will suffer.
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