One in every four women in the world is married off by the age of 17, and a government's attempt to prevent this has just been rebuffed as "blasphemous" and "anti-Islamic".
Source/Credit: Sydney Morning Herald
By Paul Sheehan | January 17, 2016
Marvi Memon is a sophisticated woman. She is a member of parliament, a former banker and businesswoman, a graduate of the London School of Economics, raised in a prominent political family. She is one of the most high-profile members of the Pakistan Muslim League, which holds government in Pakistan.
None of this helped her last week, when a draft bill she had tabled, aimed at curbing child marriages, was withdrawn after it was described as "blasphemous" by a religious authority.
The current civil law designates 16 as the legal age of marriage, but in practice sharia allows girls as young as nine to be married, providing they show signs of puberty. This reflects the primacy of sharia over civil law.
The 43-year-old Memon had introduced the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Bill to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 and impose penalties on those who arrange child marriages.
The most heroic women in the struggle for women's rights are the Muslim women who risk violence and scorn in seeking to reform Islam into a faith that reflects the equality of women, not the values of 7th century tribal society on the Arabian peninsula.
But Memon hit a roadblock of intransigent religious and cultural conservatism, an intransigence that is rising in the Muslim world, not receding.
This particular roadblock was the Council of Islamic Ideology, which has been given the power to vet all proposed legislation in Pakistan's parliament to see if it complies with sharia.
The council found the bill to be not only "anti-Islamic" but "blasphemous". The government promptly withdrew the bill.
No surprise there. The unelected council had previously opposed a law that would allow DNA testing to be admissible as evidence in rape cases. It found this conflicted with the mandate under sharia that a woman or girl claiming she was raped required four witnesses to support her claim.
Marvi Memon had been warned. When the law restricting child marriages was first proposed in 2014, the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Mohammad Khan Sheerani, had pointed out that under sharia a marriage could take place when a girl had attained puberty or signs of puberty.
At the time he was reported by Agence France-Presse as reiterating that under sharia the minimum age for marriage is nine and "parliament cannot create legislation that is against the teachings of the Holy Quran or Sunnah".
The draft bill against child marriage thus never even reached a vote. And Pakistan remains a nation in decline, with the dead hand of religious and cultural conservatism as the root cause.
[more ...]
Twitter: @Paul_Sheehan_
Read original post here: Pakistan: Push to ban child marriages dubbed 'blasphemy'
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