بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Within the Campaign: The Family: Challenges and Islamic Treatments
(Translated)
“Early marriage is a disgraceful habit.” “Early marriage is a calamity for both the boy and the girl.” “Early marriage leading to psychological, health and family problems and the loss of children’s rights.” Such statements are often repeated in seminars and conferences held by women’s institutions or human rights centers. And even in the parliament of many countries when legislating family laws, the tendency in such a case is to increase the age of marriage or to propose amending a law prohibiting marriage to youth groups at a specific age.
Women’s organizations – affiliated with the Western-funded systems – continue to organize seminars that warn against early marriage, calling on parents to fight it, and even raise demands for laws prohibiting the marriage of “adolescent girls.” This happened in Egypt, which set the age of marriage to 18 full calendar years, as stated on the portal of the Egyptian parliament on 9/9/2017 that is scheduled to discuss a law to be submitted to the Parliament to raise the age of marriage of girls to 21 years. This has also happened in Morocco, which set the age to 16 years for girls and 18 years for young men. So the legal age becomes one of the conditions of marriage, in which marriage cannot be recorded when it is absent. This is in line with the Western conventions relevant to this such as the CEDAW convention, which focuses on regulations and legislations relating to the regulation of women and men and their relationship. It is also binding on the signatory states and requires the compatibility of legislation in those countries with them. But the question is: are these international conventions that seek to prevent early marriage and view it as a crime against children and a violation of their rights applied in their origin?
According to “Al-Sharq Al-Awsat“Newspaper on 18/5/2010, under the title: “This huge number of pregnant children” mentioned, “The number of unmarried pregnant mothers is 70% more than that of married women. 55% of every 1,000 female child is pregnant. 68% of children born in the UK are from parents who did not get married. MBC channel also reported on 23/1/2012 a report on teenage pregnancy entitled “The highest proportion in the world and their ages between 15 and 19 years: Adolescent Americans give birth to 400 thousand children a year without marriage”, stating that America has the highest birth rate among adolescent girls in the developed world.” END.
The figures that reveal the number of minors who are subjected to harassment, rape, child relationships at schools in America, Europe and pregnant girls in Western schools are overwhelming, so there is no need for elaboration.
Therefore, all the international conventions that are implemented with the support of agent governments in the Muslim lands and considering them as effective laws and legislations to regulate the affairs of the family and the relationship of Muslim men with Muslim women are not valid for those who issued them to us, and that is no surprise because the one who is lacking of something cannot give it to others. How could they call for the delay of the age of marriage in our countries, while they distribute in their schools birth control pills to students to reduce the proportion of children born of adultery?? Or do their mouths conceal what their hearts hide?
I convey a quote regarding this topic, summarizing the attack on early marriage despite the personal freedom laws provided for by the same charters that criminalize early marriage. “Is not it funny and sad at the same time to launch the name “child marriage” on a girl’s marriage at the age of 17, and even consider this marriage a tragedy for the girl while at the same time the girl’s body is considered hers alone and that she has the freedom to dispose of it as she likes whenever she likes, and that no person has the right – whoever they may be – to control her or her sexual orientation, even if they be her father or mother, but she has the right to complain about her parents if they annoyed her and interfered with her personal freedom?”
The war on early marriage is not the result of today, and it is only an episode in the series of fabrication of issues within the war on Islam and its provisions. Otherwise, how do we interpret early marriage as a danger to the girl’s health when pregnant while there exist laws under CEDAW convention and others that require pregnant adolescents to continue their education without incriminating the adultery-based pregnancy, as well as enacting laws to deal with adultery-based pregnancies and give the girl the choice to either abort the pregnancy or keep it?
These charges and false arguments, proven to be invalid both medically and factually and which have been invalidated by concrete facts and statistics about the proportions of births, deaths and mothers’ ages, are nothing but a noisy fan aimed not at protecting children or liberating women but for free access to women. More clearly, it is a vigorous effort to fight Islam and its provisions concerning the family and the protection of society from the quagmire of vice and immorality. And each person approving or justifying it is nothing but a stab in the heart of the Ummah. I do not exclude here those who try to mold the provisions of Islam or interpret them to comply with international laws. Early marriage is permissible in Islam; it is the rule of our Lord (swt) and it is not befitting for any person to criticize it or rationalize it under the pretext of defending the Deen of Allah (swt).
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir
Bayan Jamal