Child marriage

[FruityPops]

Why are so many imams in the UK willing to force fourteen year old girls to marry against their wishes? Don't ordinary muslims know what's going on?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2447720/Clerics-18-mosques-caught-agreeing-marry-girls-14-Four-imams-investigated-undercover-operation.html

It's like some sort of weird racist hinterland, where almost every trope that full-on racists use is being recycled dressed in Boden.

Could you explain, roughly, what the pronouncements of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force have to do with people going about their daily business in England? Do you think the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force are a major influence? A dangerous fifth column in Tower Hamlets? Why do you think British Muslims, born in Britain, should be held accountable for what happens in Yemen or Saudi Arabia, just because they share a nominal religion?

I've read it all now.

Muslim women who cover their heads shouldn't get to give their opinion - and by only letting certain muslim women speak this is somehow meant to free Muslim women from oppression.

What sort of logic is that?

The patient people on this thread who have posted so many wise and sensible comments - thank you.

friday - I was answering Cat's post. Read the previous page and it will become clear. It's not racist to answer a post.

Yes, hogwash. Your view that lots of Muslims use Mohammed's marriage as an excuse for child marriages, is bull.

And an article in the Guardian doesn't make anything a fact.

It's not racist to answer a post.

It is if your response is "those Muslims are all up to no good, I know they are, look, here's a couple of accounts of the lunatic fringe in sub-Saharan African and amongst the Wahabbist hardcore, so it's just like that in Luton and Rochdale".

What is wrong with the following syllogism?

Gerry Adams was a terrorist.

Gerry Adams was a Catholic.

Therefore, many Christians are terrorists.

friday - I repeat - I was answering Cat's post. Read her post and my responses if you can be bothered.

Oh, not the old one about Mohammed marrying a child. You do realise that in some countries in Europe the age of consent is 14, don't you? And that historically the UK's age of consent has been 12 and even considerably younger?

It's 12 in Spain, I think.

And that historically the UK's age of consent has been 12 and even considerably younger?

Richard II married a six year old. In 1396CE. A fact that people wanting to wave around the marriage to Aisha as criticism of Islam in 600CE conveniently forget. No one appears to think that the long list of underage marriages in the British Royal Family, of which Isabella of Valois is just the most egregious example, is evidence of a deep-rooted paedophilia in England. Catherine Howard may have been as young as 13 when she married Henry VIII: it didn't save her from being executed two years later, either. Isabella of Angoulême was 13 when she married King John, as was Eleanor of Provence when she married Henry III (and had children before she was sixteen, too). Edward II's wife was 12 when they married, Edward III's 14 (and had children almost immediately).

But, oddly, racists fixate on Aisha. I wonder why that is?

Many Muslim women don't cover up. The new Radio 4 presented who is muslim does not cover her head. Plenty of Muslim women think those who cover their head have got the Koran wrong and are not doing God's work which may well require women to support equality if you read the Koran correctly. We need all women to feel they can freely speak whatever their views.

(I would support a reduction in age of consent to 14 in the UK as long as the partner is within a few years of that but that's a separate topic for another thread.)

I find it interesting all these non Muslim posters speaking on behalf of these 'many' Muslim women who feel those of us who cover have mis-read the Quran (that will be a five year education wasted for me then).

Interestingly in RL, we all tend to get along just fine without anyone casting aspersions on anyone else's grasp of pretty straight forward Arabic.

I don't think it's anyone's business whether a Muslim woman chooses to cover her head or not.

It is an issue we can have views on in a general way, which doesn't translate into have some entitlement to challenge any individual Muslim woman to justify her position, whatever it is, and require her to respond and explain.

It is an issue we can have views on in a general way

Indeed. What is unreasonable, however, is starting from the assumption that (somegroup) need ("us") to speak up for them, unless there's massive, massive evidence to believe that (somegroup) can't speak for themselves. See, for example, all the concern trolling over niqab, with people wringing their hands and saying that people can't possibly be wearing it of their own volition, and therefore need to be protected from whatever it is that is forcing them to do so.

It would be equally reasonable (or, as it is, unreasonable) to suggest that, say, some women wear short skirts because of pressure to conform to gender stereotypes and therefore need to be protected from their own "bad" decision-making caused by false consciousness. But oddly, white women in miniskirts tend to be assumed to have moral agency, and if criticised are criticised for making "wrong" decisions, while (largely) non-white women in veils tend to be infantilised and assumed to be in the thrall of their menfolk. Evidence for this tends to be, shall we say, thin.

I think the issue with Aisha's age is twofold

1. The early marriage itself isn't such an issue as there was a definite issue of protecting the weak involved in an early marriage. But she herself stated that she was 9 when she put away her dolls and started sleeping with Mohammed (at his instigation)

1. As the founder of a religion and by default the person who sets moral tone for the followers, unashamedly sleeping with a vulnerable 9 year old sets one hell of a precedent about when and if women are ever allowed to have a say in their own lives.

But she herself stated that she was 9

Given that the ages of the nobility who were intermarrying with English kings nine hundred years later aren't documented to a precision better than a five year window, you're placing an awful lot of faith in the literal precision of what's written in a text from 600CE. It's not exactly an uncontested topic.

Slug, it was over a thousand years ago - almost 2 thousand. Should Mohammed have thought 'oh wait a minute! This might not be socially acceptable in a few millennia.' How silly.

Mary, Jesus's mother, is supposed to have been about 11/12 when she had Jesus. So if you are looking at it from that respect, even God was at it.

Didn't Richard II marry Princess Isobel of France when she was 6?

Indeed, Wanna, as I pointed out upthread. Although it's unlikely it was consummated at that stage (or at all, in fact). Canon law tended to delay consummation until at least 12 (girls) or 14 (boys) and by the time Isobel was 12, Richard was dead.

I always agreed with the theory he was gay and he married her so he could delay sleeping with her

Sorry for the derail

She was past the age of puberty when she went to live with the Prophet. I love how the posters getting their info via the infallible google are taking that as the gospel (hah).

We have always been taught that she had reached puberty when she went to live with the Prophet, given the time; almost 2000 years ago, the environment and type of diet and life expectancy it's likely.

Taking a free man as a slave is forbidden in Islam.

Given all the expiations of sins entailing setting slaves free along with the above, Islamically it's very difficult to practice slavery.