The difference between Sharia and common decency reaffirmed once again.
Originally published by Veritas International Enterprise.
Muslim attempts at “reformation” continue to be limited to words not actions. A few days ago, efforts to set a minimum age for marriage in Saudi Arabia “received a blow after the Grand Mufti said there was nothing wrong with girls below 15 getting married.”
Two years earlier, the justice ministry began pushing for setting a minimum age in the Arabian kingdom. According to Gulf News, “It submitted an integrated study on the negative psychological and social effects of underage marriages to religious scholars and requested a fatwa that sets a minimum age.”
However, the ulema—the “religious scholar,” the learned ones of Islamic law—responded by totally ignoring the request. Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, its Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, shrugged the whole matter off by saying “There is currently no intention to discuss the issue.” In other words, case closed.
Although the brief Gulf News report focuses on the age 15, going back to earlier reports when the justice ministry began bringing this issue up, one discovers that the issue at stake is full-blown pedophilia.
Back in 2011, for example, Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”
Appearing in Saudi papers, the fatwa complained that “Uninformed interference with Sharia rulings by the press and journalists is on the increase”—likely a reference to the justice ministry’s advocacy—“posing dire consequences to society, including their interference with the question of marriage to small girls who have not reached maturity, and their demand that a minimum age be set for girls to marry.”
Fawzan insisted that nowhere does Sharia (or Islamic law) set an age limit for marrying girls: like countless Muslim scholars before him, he relied on Koran 65:4, which discusses marriage to females who have not yet begun menstruating (i.e., are prepubescent) and the fact that Muhammad, Islam’s role model, married Aisha when she was six or seven, “consummating” the marriage—or, in modern/Western parlance, raping her—when she was nine.