Mehdi Hasan is a Shia Muslim who is not only a television. presenter, but also a journalist who regularly writes about the excesses of Islam. He’s decried the Islamic death penalty for apostasy as well as suicide bombing, sharia law, and Muslim political expansionism. That, of course, gets him in trouble with his co-religionists. He’s a brave man.
His latest piece in the New Statesman, “British Muslims should stand up and say it; there is nothing Islamic about child marriage,” will get him in more hot water, but this is exactly the kind of thing that “moderate” Muslims should be writing. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will work.
Hasan’s piece is based on an investigative report by ITV (documented in a program called “Forced to Marry”) in which undercover reporters contacted 56 British mosques, posing as a Muslim mother and father wishing to marry off an underaged daughter of 14. (The legal age of marriage in Britain is 16.)
Surprisingly, 18 of the mosques—32%—said it would be no problem. (Remember, this is in Britain.) Their stance was, of course, based on the Muslim tradition of child brides, one I thought was hallowed by the religion because Muhamed was said to have married a six-year old and had sex with her three years later.
The imam of a mosque in Manchester was secretly recorded as saying that performing such a marriage would “not be a problem”. An imam in Birmingham, despite being told that the girl didn’t want to get married, could be heard saying: “She’s 14. By sharia, grace of God, she’s legal to get married. Obviously Islam has made it easy for us . . . We’re doing it because it’s OK through Islam.”
. . . Frustratingly, many Muslim scholars and seminaries still cling to the view that adulthood, and the age of sexual consent, rests only on biological puberty: that is, 12 to 15 for boys and nine to 15 for girls.
Nine to fifteen!
But according to Hasan, there is actually nothing in Muslim law or tradition sanctioning child brides. This was a surprise to me:
As is often the case, there is no single, immutable “Islamic” view. As Usama Hasan, a reform-minded British Muslim scholar and former imam, argues: “There was a rival view in Islamic jurisprudence, even in ancient and medieval times: that emotional and intellectual maturity was also required, and was reached between the ages of 15 and 21.” The latter view, he tells me, “has been adopted by most civil codes of Muslim-majority countries for purposes of marriage”.
The Quran does not contain a specific legal age of marriage, but it does make clear that men and women must be both physically mature and of sound judgement in order to get married. It is also worth clarifying that Prophet Muhammad did not, as is often claimed, marry a child bride named Aisha. Yes, I’ll concede that there is a saying in Sahih Bukhari, one of the six canonical Hadith collections of Sunni Islam, attributed to Aisha herself, which suggests she was six years old when she was married to Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated. Nevertheless, there are plenty of Muslim historians who dispute this particular Hadith and argue Aisha was in reality aged somewhere between 15 and 21.
. . . Ififi al-Akiti, an Oxford-based theologian trained in traditional Islamic madrasas across south Asia and North Africa, tells me that the vast majority of classical scholars throughout Muslim history agreed on a minimum marriage age of 18 – two years older, incidentally, than secular Britain’s current age of consent.
Well, I’m a bit worried that the dispute about that particular hadith is manufactured to get the right results, but it doesn’t matter, for there are other Islamic customs that, while not appearing in the Qur’an or hadith, have become religious tradition, like the wearing of headscarves or burqas. Something doesn’t have to be in holy scripture to acquire a religious patina. Eating fish on Friday, or not eating matzos on Passover that take more than 18 minutes to make, are post facto interpretations of what God wants, not clear dictates of the Old or New Testaments, or even the Talmud.
The problem with Islam is that, unlike the other Abrahamic religions, interpreting its scriptures as metaphorical is a no-no, making it harder to overturn customs supposedly sanctioned by the Qur’an or hadith. That’s the reason Hasan tries to show that child marriage is not Qur’anic, for if Muslims recognize that, they’ll have a reason to stop it.
But even if child brides were approved by the Qur’an in pure and straightforward language, the practice would still be be wrong. We’re more enlightened now than we ere in the sixteenth century, and the taking of child brides is now recognized, at least by enlightened people, as child abuse.
Sadly, it’s easier to convince Muslims that something is not Qur’anic than that it’s simply wrong, as any evil supposedly sanctioned by the Qur’an or hadith becomes law merely by its inclusion in scripture. That’s why, for example, Reza Aslan tries to show that Mohamed and the practices he dictated were basically okay (and much less malevolent than we think), because they’re based on a “proper” reading of the Qur’an. Aslan was not interpreting Muslim scriptures metaphorically, but by (supposedly) showing that those scriptures had been misread. (Granted, there’s a thin line between “metaphor” and “misreading”.)
I dislike “metaphorizing” because it’s simply a weaselly way to save scripture that’s been shown as either scientifically wrong or immoral by modern standards. It’s intellectually dishonest, for it allows one to cherry-pick whatever you like as God’s will, and write off the rest as meaning something other than what it seems. Still, metaphorizing has worked to our favor by allowing some liberal Christians to approve gay marriage, equality of women, and so on.
But metaphorizing won’t work with Islam. The Qur’an is fundamentally a barbaric and straightforward document, and there’s no liberal tradition of metaphorical interpretation. The only way to stop the scripturally-based excesses of Islam is to either outlaw them or try, as many of us are doing, to show that the religion is silly, manmade, and, like all faiths, deserves to be tossed in the dustbin of outmoded beliefs.
h/t: Grania
