Child Brides in Turkey

by Burak Bekdil • July 30, 2018 at 5:00 am

According to Turkish Philanthropy Funds, 40% of girls under the age of 18 in Turkey are forced into marriage.
"Low education" means almost all of Turkey: The average schooling in the country is a mere 6.5 years.
In January 2018, a government body under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's jurisdiction suggested that, according to Islamic law, girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 12 could marry.
In Turkey you may abuse a 13-year-old and walk free, but you may not tease the president.

Turkey's president from 2007 to 2014, Abdullah Gül (left), was a 30-year-old man when he married his wife Hayrünnisa (right) when she was 15 years old. (Photo by NATO press office via Getty Images)

Where would you like your daughter to be when she is 13? In school, or in bed with a grown man? The answer to this question is largely beyond argument in much of the world. In Islamic societies, however -- including non-Arab and theoretically secular Turkey -- the answer is anyone's guess. Usually in such states, the police power of the government does not fight the patriarchal tradition; instead, it supports it.

Turkey's former president, Abdullah Gül, incumbent Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's former ally and co-founder of the party that has ruled Turkey since 2002, was a 30-year-old man when he married his wife Hayrünnisa when she was 15. Gül, nominated for the presidency by Erdoğan, was Turkey's first Islamist president.

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In Iran: The Past is a Foreign Country

by Amir Taheri • July 30, 2018 at 4:00 am

Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors branded all accords that Iran signed under the Shah as "a Zionist conspiracy against Islam." Now they are trying to eat humble pie in the hope of regaining some of the privileges Iran lost when they seized power.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claims that cooperation accords signed between Iran and the US in the 1950s contradict President Trump's threatened decision to impose new sanctions on the Islamic Republic. (Photo by Lennart Preiss/Getty Images)

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is how English writer L.P. Hartley, in his novel The Go-Between, comments on the ambiguity of our relations with a past that fascinates and confuses us. I was reminded of Hartley's enigmatic phrase last week as I skimmed through a series of news stories indicating the discovery by the Khomeinist establishment in Tehran of Iran's past.

There was Iran's President Hassan Rouhani advising US President Donald Trump not to ignore Iran's "7,000-year old civilization" in stark contradiction to Ayatollah Khomeini's claim that the whole of Iranian history before his seizure of power should be classified as "jahiliyah" (darkness).

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