Posts for Oct 4th: Saudi child bride, Choudhry's process, AQ threatens Christians, Taliban flog drug-addicts, Mosque's hate campaign in UK, Taliban blow schools

1. Saudi Arabia: 80-year-old man marries 14-year-old and now refuses to divorce: “Her father said he does not have the money (for the divorce) and is appealing for all benevolent people to help him so he will regain his daughter…the old man has threatened that they either pay him or he will take her by force.”
2. UK: Woman stabbed MP Timms "in revenge for Iraq war vote": Jeremy Dein QC, defending Roshonara Choudhry, 21, said she did not recognise the jurisdiction of the court and did not wish her lawyers to challenge evidence put before the jury.
3. Iraq: All Christians "targets", Al-Qaeda in Iraq says: Wednesday, the group released a new message saying, “The Ministry of War of Islamic State of Iraq declares that all the centers, organizations and bodies of Christian leaders and followers have become legitimate targets by the Mujahedeens, wherever our hands will reach them.” According to witnesses, one of the attackers was 12-years-old.
4. Pakistan: Taliban publicly flog men for "taking drugs" against their diktat: Members of the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan detained 65 tribesmen on the “charge” of selling and using hashish and heroin... After they were “sentenced” by the militant court, the men were taken to a ground on Sunday and each of them was given 10 lashes by Taliban fighters as a large crowd watched.
5. UK: Mosque linked to hate campaign against Ahmadiyya Muslims: Evidence shows Ahmadiyya Muslims are being demonised and ostracised by UK Islamic fundamentalist group Khatme Nabuwat, whose hardline clerics have been preaching in south London mosques.
6. Pakistan: Taliban blow up another school in Mohmand Agency: Another girls primary school was destroyed by miscreants on Tuesday. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack.

Magazine: The People's Cube.

Yemen: supporting the child bride laws

This is an update on this story:

Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party Islaah and the imam of the Al-Rahman mosque in the Yemeni capital of Sana, is one of those who staunchly opposes a legal ban on child marriage.
Although he emphasizes that a woman should not get married before she is physically and mentally ready and that she herself needs to accept the marriage, he believes a law that prohibits child marriage constitutes a rights violation.  
“I am against the child marriage law because it restrains the freedom of others. When a certain age [for marriage] is set, it violates the rights of others. For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex. … This is a violation of his rights,” Sheik Hamzi told The Times in an interview at his Sana home last week.

The fact that girls are abused, raped (see Nojoud’s case - 1, 2, 3-) and even killed is not important. The important thing is that some kind of teenager with pimples could have his “rights” to having sex diminished. Let’s get this right: none of these girls are married to a 15 year-old boy. They are married to full-grown adults (even old guys) who want to have a very obedient girl at home.

Hazmi dismisses claims by rights groups that there is a problem with child marriages in his country. He said the child-bride cases that have been reported in the media were merely isolated incidents.
“Just ask my mother and sisters how many times they’ve found a little girl getting married at the marriages they’ve attended,"  he said. "Not many.”
The country's Ministry of Social Affairs, on the contrary, says child marriages are common in Yemen. According to a 2009 report by the ministry, a quarter of all females in Yemen marry before the age of 15. (Of course, this means that they are so few, doesn’t it).
To Hazmi, however,  women's- and children's-rights activists are putting a few isolated cases of  child marriage in the spotlight to rally support for the law.
"There is no problem here with child marriage," he said. "These cases of young girls getting married are exceptions. These organizations that are promoting for this law couldn’t find any examples except for those of Nujoud and Elham."  (NOTE.- Some days ago another 11-year-old girl was also hospitalised after suffering from genital injuries. If I, that have no ground or deep knowledge of the problem but just what I read, have found another case, which happened very few days ago, imagine someone who has access to the data base of the Interior Ministry. In fact, around 50% of Yemeni girls are married before 18).
Hazmi said the groups that are campaigning for the law were harmful to the country, trying to promote a "Western agenda" in Yemen.
“It’s all a Western agenda they are following," he said. "They get paid from the West to make us to believe in Western culture. This is very bad because our culture is different here."
The best that could happen, in his opinion, is that the government shuts them down.
“No one wants to marry these women's-rights activists anyway," he said. "They’re just depressed that they are not married and jealous.”

Oh, please, this is soooo old an argument. Every woman who wants basic rights is because is ugly and doesn’t have any gorgeous guy this one to marry. But it’s interesting that chauvinist male pigs always use the same type of reason to deny women’s rights. “There are no males to marry these women, that’s why we marry prepubescent girls, in fact 1 out of four”. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous?

Anyway, for me it’s worse to see women demonstrating against child brides ban, than seen this bearded lazy imam speaking against them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Another Dead Child-Bride (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Brides of Death: Yemen Child Dies from Rupture of Sex Organs after Marriage (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
• Dead Yemeni child bride tied up, raped, says mom (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 13-year-old Yemeni bride dies of bleeding (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Bride, 11, Hospitalized with Genital Injuries (abcnews.go.com)

Cross-posted from T&P.

Yemen: women protests ban on child marriages

Thousands of women demonstrated outside parliament Sunday to oppose legislation banning the marriage of girls under 17. The protesters held up banners proclaiming “don’t ban what Allah made permissible,” or “stop violating Islamic sharia law in the name of rights and freedoms.” Proposed amendments to the civil status law stalled in parliament last August after severe opposition to a government proposal that would ban girls under 17 and males under 18 from marrying. Child marriages are common, especially in rural areas, where girls as young as eight have been married off.

via “Stop violating Islamic sharia in the name of rights and freedoms!”.

I bet Nojoud doesn't think (1, 2, 3) the same as these women.

From Yemen Times:

Yemeni Child Bride Age 12 Dies in Labor

From CNN:

Yemeni girl, 12, dies in painful childbirth

By Mohammed JamjoomCNN

AMMAN, Jordan (CNN) -- A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children's rights group said Monday.

Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.

"Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening," said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.

Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said.

Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port.

More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 -- many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found.

While it was not immediately known why Fawziya's parents married her off, the reasons vary. Sometimes, financially-strapped parents offer up their daughters for hefty dowries.

Marriage means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. And often, parents will extract a promise from the husband to wait until the girl is older to consummate the marriage.

The issue of Yemeni child brides came to the forefront in 2008 with 10-year-old Nujood Ali.

She was pulled out of school and married to a man who beat and raped her within weeks of the ceremony.

To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi -- the first time in her life -- to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge.

After a well-publicized trial, she was granted a divorce.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

Young Saudi girl's marriage ended

Media reports say an arranged marriage between a Saudi girl aged eight and a man in his 50s has been annulled, in a case attracting worldwide criticism.

The Saudi Gazette says the divorce was agreed in an out-of-court settlement after a judge rejected two attempts to grant the girl a divorce.

The case prompted Saudi officials to say it would start regulating the marriages of young girls.

Rights groups say some Saudi families marry off young daughters for money.

The judge who first heard the case in the town of Unaiza refused to end the marriage at the request of the girl's mother , but he stipulated the groom could not have sex with the girl until she reached puberty.

The girl's father is said to have married her off against her mother's wishes to a close friend in order that he could pay off a debt.

A new judge was appointed to oversee the case, who issued the annulment after the husband finally gave up his insistence that the marriage had been legal, reports say.

Saudi Arabia implements an austere form of Sunni Islam that bans free association between the sexes and gives fathers the right to wed their children to whomever they deem fit.

Saudi commentators pointed out that the marriage took place in the central province of Qaseem - the heartland of Saudi Islamic fundamentalism.

Earlier this year, the country's highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Shaikh, said it was not against Islamic law to marry off girls who are 15 and younger.

On 15 April, after this case generated considerable negative publicity, Justice Minister Muhammad Issa said he wanted to put an end to the "arbitrary" way in which parents and guardians could marry off their young daughters.

However, he he did not say that the practice would be banned.