It's Just A Cultural Thing

We must celebrate our cultural diversity...

CRIPPLED FOR LIFE--> Muslim Child Brides in Nigeria

You can tell much about a society by looking at how they treat their children. What do they teach them...how do they socialize them into society...etc. Sometimes as Americans we don't do the best job.. violent cartoons, stereotypes and other thing we sometimes pass to our kids (both my kids knew "pull my finger" before they were three). But overall I think we do try to teach them about freedom, citizenship, and good work ethic.

In Judaism's most important prayer, the Sh'mah, we are commanded to teach our children about loving God. In fact the rabbis tell us a story about God asking us what we would do to guarantee the Torah, and our answer was, we will teach it to out children.

Islam is different. Child abuse is inherent in Islam especially marrying and having sexual relations with little girls. Heck Muhammad married his favorite wife when she was SIX. He consummated the marriage when she was NINE

There is no argument on this point among Islamic authorities whether shia or sunni. They all agree that a Muslim man can have sex with baby girl.

This is what Imam Khomeini, the top shia authority says:

“A Muslim man can have sexual pleasure with a little girl as young as a baby. But he should not penetrate her vaginally, however he can sodomize her”. (Tehriro vasyleh, fourth edition, Qom, Iran, 1990)

Here is what the the top Sunni authority says (video on a Saudi website) about having sex with a one day old baby girl. (Go to “site video” and click on sex with a one day old girl)

In most societies the perpetrators would be thrown in Jail, or at least shunned as pedophiles. But this is the Religion of Peace at work. In northern Nigeria, Muslim girls (as young as 12) are being forced into marriage. They are being forced into bearing children before their bodies are developed enough and because of that they are being crippled for life;

Broken lives: Nigeria's child brides who end up on the streets

Child brides in Nigeria are often crippled by childbirth. Their injuries lead to incontinence, shame and exile

Ramita Navai in Kano

In a small, dimly lit brothel in the red-light district of Kano in northern Nigeria nearly all the young prostitutes lined up on plastic chairs are runaway brides.

“I was married when I was 15 years old. I was forced into it,” said Hadiza.

Whenever her husband attempted to consummate the marriage, Hadiza would flee to her parents’ home, but they kept returning her to the man to whom she had been married off.

Finally her husband raped her: the attack was so violent that Hadiza was sent to hospital.

“We have no choice. If you’re not married by the time you’re 16, people think there must be something wrong with you,” she said. The girls around her nod silently - some of them had been forced to marry when they were only 12.

Northern Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world: nearly half of all girls here are married by the age of 15.

The consequences have been devastating. Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality rate in Africa and one of the world’s highest rates of fistula, a condition that can occur when the pressure of childbirth tears a hole between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Many women are left incontinent for life. Up to 800,000 women suffer from fistula in Nigeria.

“They marry young, they get pregnant young, they deliver young and they pick up the fistula,” said Kees Waaldijk, the chief consultant surgeon at the Babbar Ruga hospital, the world’s largest fistula clinic, in the northern state of Katsina.

Most cases happen to young girls during their first pregnancy, and nearly half the patients at Babbar Ruga are under 16.

Dr Waaldijk operates on up to 600 women a year, with no electricity or running water. He sterilises his equipment in a steel casserole pot that sits on a gas camping stove. Rows of girls and women - some as young as 13 - lie listlessly on rusty hospital beds, each connected to a catheter.
The smell of urine is overpowering and many of the women have been cast out from their communities. Some have been divorced by their husbands - it is estimated that up to half of adolescent girls in northern Nigeria are divorced. “If nothing is done the woman ends up crippled for life: medically, socially, mentally and emotionally,” Dr Waaldijk said.

The Nigerian federal Government has attempted to outlaw child marriage. In 2003 it passed the Child Rights Act, prohibiting marriage under the age of 18. In the Muslim northern states, though, there has been fierce resistance to the Act, with many people portraying it as antiIslamic. “Child marriage in Islam is permissible. In the Koran there is no specific age of marriage,” said Imam Sani, a liberal cleric in the northern state of Kaduna. He said that this was the root cause of the opposition among the more hardline mullahs, who believe that matters of Islamic “personal” law - marriage, divorce and inheritance - must be governed by the Koran, not the state.

“The Muslim clerics have a problem with this Child Rights Act and they decried it, they castigate it, they reject it and they don’t want it introduced in Nigeria,” Mr Sani said.

He said there would be serious repercussions if the federal Government attempted to impose a minimum age of marriage. “There will be violent conflict from the Muslims, saying that ‘no, we will not accept this, we’d rather die than accept something which is not a law from Allah’.”
Half of Nigeria’s 36 states have passed the Act, but it has been adopted by only one of the dozen Muslim states - and even that one made a crucial amendment substituting the age of 18 for the term “puberty”.

Each state in Nigeria has the constitutional right to amend legislation to comply with its local traditions and religion, meaning that central government is powerless to impose a minimum age of marriage.

Other vocal opponents to the Act include village heads and elders - almost all men - highlighting the tribal and cultural constraints that hamper attempts to stamp out child marriage.
“It is important we have the right to marry our girls young so there is no risk of pregnancy outside marriage. It is to preserve the purity of our girls,” said Usman, an 84-year-old man from the village of Yammaw Fulani, who married a 14-year-old girl four years ago. “We will never accept this law,” he said.