The Nigerian case commented upon by Shani and Ahangar concerned the marriage of a girl who was chronologically a major, being nineteen years old. An equally serious problem exists in regard to girls married as mere children.
It is indeed ironic that the issue of Islamic CLQ containing Shani and Ahangar’s dissent from the Karimatu Yakubu decision appeared (or at least reached foreign subscribers) virtually simultaneously with the newspaper coverage of the shockingly brutal murder of a Nigerian child bride.
The following account is summarized from an article in the Washington Post, 3 May 1987, dateline Kano, Nigeria.
The child was married at the age of nine years to a man old enough to be her father and to whom her own father owned money which he could not repay. At the age of twelve, she was forced to go to her husband.
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Twice she ran away from him; twice her father forced her to return. The third time she ran away, her husband caught her and hacked off her legs with an axe. The girl subsequently died in hospital.
The same issue of the Washington Post carried another article which dealt with the health problems of Nigerian girls married as children who become pregnant before their bodies are physically mature.
It needs to be strongly emphasized that the onset of menstruation does not signify physical fitness for the burden of pregnancy and childbirth.
Pressure on the bladder during pregnancy and labour causes an injury which renders these unfortunate young girls incontinent with regard to urine.
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Deserted by their husbands and rejected by their own families because of their malodorous affliction (wrongly believed to be contagious) these young girls an estimated 20,000 of them in northern Nigeria are forced to survive on the streets by begging.
The Muslim father’s role in selecting a spouse for his daughter and his right to compel her in marriage as a minor, and even as a major in classical Maliki and Shafi’i law, is predicated on the assumption that the father will act in the best interests of the girl.
This assumption, as the Nigerian situation proves, cannot always be relied upon and provides, unfortunately, very limited protection to the girl most in need of it.
Indeed, the Washington Post quoted an editorial appearing in New Nigerian (a newspaper identified as the “voice of the country’s northern-based Islamic establishment”) as saying that Muslim girls “have become pawns in a new money game.”
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In a majority of cases, the issue of forced marriage surfaces to satisfy the materialistic interests of parents.”
The result is not only detrimental to the health and safety of young girls, but constitutes a flagrant derogation of the rights and dignity of women as full human beings which Islam pioneered centuries ago.
Muslims (in Nigeria and elsewhere) must address themselves to the actual situations confronting the female members of their community and seriously consider how to secure and protect in present-day circumstances the (ancient but as yet never fully realised) rights that the revelations of fifteen centuries ago vouchsafed to women.
A minimal age of marriage protecting a girl from the hazards of early pregnancy, coupled with provisions for the avoidance of marriages contracted during minority, and drastic curtailment of the Maliki/Shafi’i father’s right of ijbar over his major daughter would appear to be urgently necessary.