Parwana Malik was just nine years old when her father sold her as a bride to a man in his 50s, desperate to find enough money to feed his family.
As tears streamed down his face, Abdul Malik pleaded with the groom to show mercy to his little girl.
‘This is your bride. Please take care of her. You are responsible now, please don’t beat her,’ he said.
The Taliban has formally recognised child marriages under a sweeping new family law regulation that sets out rules for marriages involving minors and establishes specific guidelines governing ‘virgin girls’.
The 31-page article regulation called ‘Principles of Separation Between Spouses’ outlines rules governing the dissolution of marriages under an endless list of religious and legal conditions.
These include child marriage, breastfeeding relations, forced separation, missing husbands, apostasy and accusations of adultery.
A federal court in Pakistan on February 3rd granted custody of a 13-year-old Christian girl, Maria Shahbaz, to a Muslim man who had kidnapped her, converted her to Islam, and ‘married’ her.
Judges rejected the birth certificate Maria’s parents provided, which proved her age. Furthermore, the judges disregarded earlier judicial findings that the marriage was illegal, Safdar Chaudhry, chairperson of rights group Raah-e-Nijaat Ministry, told Christian Daily International–Morning Star News.
Ruweida, a bridal make-up artist in Sadr City, says her clients this year were “almost entirely children”
Dozens of baby-faced schoolgirls drift through worn, neon-lit shops on “bridal boulevard” in Baghdad’s Sadr City wearing black abayas soon to be traded for puffball wedding gowns picked by their mothers.
Among them is 12-year-old Amani*, who is due to meet her 17-year-old fiancé for the first time on their wedding night — a betrothal arranged, according to relatives, “without the need for her permission” because, despite her tiny, shaking frame engulfed in an adult-sized tulle gown, she has reached puberty and her marriage was approved by a local cleric.
The harrowing cases of Mahak Siddique and Alshaba Adnan expose a deeply disturbing pattern of violence, exploitation, and systemic failure in addressing crimes against underage girls from minority communities in Pakistan. Babar son of Mukhtar, operating under aliases such as Ghulam Rasool and Muhammad Babar Ali, emerges as a serial predator who manipulates religious institutions to perpetrate kidnapping, forced conversion, rape, and child marriage. These acts, committed with impunity and aided by accomplices including Muhammad Aftab, Shan Masih, and Khurram Masih, reveal a chilling disregard for human dignity and legal accountability.
A six-year-old girl has allegedly been forced to marry a 45-year-old man in Afghanistan after she was given away for money.
The haunting photo of an older man and a little girl standing together horrified even the Taliban, who intervened with the union.
The youngster had allegedly been exchanged by her father for money to a man who already has two wives, it was reported by Amu.tv.
The uncomfortable truth is that the practice of sexual abuse and enslavement is condoned by Islamic scriptures.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. They murdered 1,200 people, burned families alive, and wounded over 5,000. They tortured and raped women, and abducted roughly 250 hostages, including babies, children and women, many of whom were later killed.
The world watched in horror, shocked by the astonishing brutality. But this was not the first instance of jihadists kidnapping and enslaving Jewish women and families. In fact, the first victims of Islamic sexual slavery were Jewish women and girls in Arabia during the seventh century.
People in Iraq and members of human rights organizations are protesting against the law, but if adopted women and children are in danger.
On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament held its first reading of a bill that allows girls as young as nine years old to be married. The bill would amend the Personal Status Law of 1959, which has been hailed as the most protective law for women in the Middle East.
The Personal Status Law was passed shortly after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. The law put the governance of personal affairs, such as inheritance and marriage, in the hands of the state and took it out of the control of religious authorities. It also requires both men and women to be 18 years-old, or 15 years or older with permission of a judge and legal guardian, to be married under civil law.
This unpleasant story persists. Islamists, citing the hadith – a dubious source of Prophet Mohammed’s sayings written 200 years after his death and on which Islamist scholars have never agreed for 14 centuries — defend their lust for underage girls. [Here is a long list of Turkish Islamist practices of pedophilia in the past years.]
Most recently, in November, Turkey was shocked at news that a prominent Islamic sheik, the leader of a religious order fiercely devoted to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had married off his six-year-old daughter to a 29-year-old disciple. Six! The girl had been forced into sex and became a mother at 14. She complained to the prosecutor’s office, but Erdogan’s authorities apparently did not want to bother the sheik.
A former Danish immigration minister has been found guilty of illegally separating young asylum-seeking couples in a landmark impeachment trial.
Judges ruled Inger Stoejberg’s decision in 2016 to separate couples was unlawful and jailed her for 60 days.
Ms Stoejberg said she was very surprised by the verdict as the policy was designed to combat child marriage.
The case was Denmark’s first impeachment trial in three decades and only the sixth in its history.
None of the organizations dedicated to combating it dares face why it’s so prevalent.
It was an emblematic incident: the News Agency of Nigeria reported Wednesday that “the Chief Imam of the Nasrul-lahi-li Fathi Society of Nigeria (NASFAT), Abdul Azeez Onike, says Islam supports underage marriage.” Onike said thus at a press conference launching his new initiative, “Ending Violence Against Women and Girls,” which was “organised by NASFAT with support from UNICEF.” Is UNICEF troubled by Onike’s support for child marriage? Not enough to keep from working with him. This was yet another example of the abject failure of global “human rights” organizations to confront the uncomfortable fact of why child marriage is so common in some areas of the world: because it is sanctioned in Islam.
