Malaysia, Thailand, Islam

It's rare to see such real and unvarnished journalism:

One day this summer, 11-year-old Ayu married 41-year-old Che Abdul Karim Che Hamid at a small pink mosque on the banks of the Golok river in the far south of Thailand. Earlier that morning, Che Abdul Karim and his soon-to-be child bride had travelled over the border from Malaysia into the Thai province of Narathiwat for the wedding. After a short ceremony at 11am and a trip to the Islamic Council offices to get their marriage certificate stamped, the couple crossed back over the border. Ayu, was now Che Abdul Karim’s third wife.

These followers of Pedo Mo deserve a special place in Hell.

Hashim Yusoff, the imam who married the couple, defended the arrangement: Ayu (not her real name) was “mature” he said, so the marriage was sah (legal under sharia law). The imam did make Che Abdul Karim – himself an imam in a rural village – pledge not to have sexual relations with his young wife, but medical tests since are said to show that the 41-year-old did not keep his promise.

This imam who married an 11-year-old girl promised to not rape have sex with his sex-slave wife! What exactly was the point of the marriage then?

Since 2003, under Thailand’s strict child protection laws, no one under 17 can marry, and sex with a minor is a prosecutable offence. However, in the southern provinces of Thailand – Narathiwat, Pattani and Yalla, which are majority Muslim – a legal loophole allows Muslim communities to apply Islamic law to family matters. 

According to this law, there is no minimum age for marriage and, culturally, girls are deemed eligible as soon as they start menstruating.

This is how it starts. This is the same kind of thing Muslims want in the West: a separate legal system for themselves. So, in relative secret, the Muslim men can marry underage girls, practice polygamy (while collecting welfare benefits since in the eyes of the state the second wife with children is a single mother), mutilate genitals of little girls, etc.

For the secretary of the Islamic Council, Abdul Razak Ali, whose own mother was just 13 when she married his 70-year-old father, allowing under-18s to marry was justified as a way to prevent “hideous” cases of adultery or illegitimacy. This also extended to forcing underage girls who are raped to marry their rapists.

A very special place in Hell.