UK: Muslims push for abolishing of age restrictions on marriage

"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

In Islam, Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur'an 33:21). Thus he is exemplary even in his marriage to a child: Muslims take this seriously and imitate Muhammad in this. 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."

The 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: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."

Time magazine reported in 2001: "In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum age of fifteen for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)"

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that over half of the girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of eighteen. In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen. In an Afghan refugee camp, more than two out of three second-grade girls were either married or engaged, and virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were already married. One ten-year-old was engaged to a man of sixty.

Muslim clerics in Yemen say that to oppose child marriage makes one an apostate.

The above video from December 2009 was just sent to me by Jihad Watch reader Carol. It illustrates an important point: we are constantly assured that no Muslims, none, want to bring the elements of Sharia that are incompatible with Western law into Western countries. We are compelled to believe this on pain of charges of "Islamophobia." But here is clear evidence that at least some Muslims believe that their coreligionists there should push for the legalization of pedophilia.

And note that this is advanced in the video as a human rights cause, a matter of compassion for Muslim men and their families. If such a movement begins in Britain, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would proceed the way attempts to assert Sharia provisions in the West are already proceeding: by claiming "racism" and "bigotry," asserting that all opposition is "hate" and "Islamophobia," and calling for equal rights, human rights, etc. (Don't miss also the brief tu quoque: the photo of Warren Jeffs.) If Britain and the U.S. and other non-Muslim countries do not call a halt to this mau-mauing and insist on their own laws and own cultures, those laws and cultures will certainly be overwhelmed and Islamized.