Age no bar in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's religious police, or mutaween, officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, prevented young girls from escaping from a school building that had caught fire. Reason: They were "not properly attired". The screaming, frightened girls were pushed back into the blaze, to die. Fifteen of them perished. At least this 8-year-old was spared a life of misery and pain.
8-year-old Saudi girl divorces 50-year-old husband

By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI
CAIRO (AP)

An 8-year-old Saudi girl has divorced her middle-aged husband after her father forced her to marry him last year in exchange for about $13,000, her lawyer said Thursday. Saudi Arabia has come under increasing criticism at home and abroad for permitting child marriages.
The United States, a close ally of the conservative Muslim kingdom, has called child marriage a "clear and unacceptable" violation of human rights. The girl was allowed to divorce the 50-year-old man who she married in August after an out-of-court settlement had been reached in the case, said her lawyer, Abdulla al-Jeteli. The exact date of the divorce was not immediately known.
A court in the central Oneiza region previously rejected a request by the girl's mother for a divorce and ruled that the girl would have to wait until she reached puberty to file a petition then.
There are no laws in Saudi Arabia defining the minimum age for marriage. Though a woman's consent is legally required, some marriage officials don't seek it.
But there has been a push by Saudi human rights groups to define the age of marriage and put an end to the phenomenon. One Saudi human rights activist Sohaila Zain al-Abdeen was optimistic that the girl's divorce would help efforts to get a law passed enforcing a minimum marriage age of 18.
"Unfortunately, some fathers trade their daughters," she told The Associated Press. "They are weak people who are sometimes in need of money and forget their roles as parents." It was not clear if the man received money for the divorce settlement. The man had given
the girl's father 50,000 riyals, or about $13,350, as a marriage gift in return for his daughter, the lawyer said.
The 8-year-old girl's marriage was not the only one in the kingdom to receive attention in recent months. Saudi newspapers have highlighted several cases in which young girls were married off to much older men or young boys including a 15-year-old girl whose father, a death-row inmate, married her off to a cell mate.
Saudi Arabia's conservative Muslim clergy have opposed the drive to end child marriages. In January, the kingdom's most senior cleric said it was permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who believe they are too young are doing the girls an injustice. But some in the government appear to support the movement to set a minimum age for marriage. The kingdom's new justice minister was quoted in mid-April as saying the government was doing a study on underage marriage that would include regulations.
There are no statistics to show how many marriages involving children are performed in Saudi Arabia every year. Activists say the girls are given away in return for hefty marriage gifts or as a result of long-standing custom in which a father promises his infant daughters and sons to cousins out of a belief that marriage will protect them from illicit relationships.
And here's another good news story:

In April, a Yemeni girl, age 8, was granted a divorce from her 28-year-old husband who abused her physically and sexually, after she sued her father and spouse. That was the first time a girl had petitioned Yemen’s courts for such a thing. Some groups estimate that as many as 50 percent of Yemeni marriages involve children.

An anonymous donor from the Emirates gave the girl, Nojoud, enough money to pay her way out of the marriage. Shariah law actually called for her abusive husband to be awarded, not prosecuted. But for Nojoud, that was a small price to pay for her freedom.

Coffee Break

'Arab Pardha' smothers India

Kanchan Gupta

Every time I visit Kerala, which I have been doing quite frequently these past two-and-a-half-years, I am struck by the rapid Islamisation of 'God's Own Country'. The rain-gorged verdant plains and hills along the lush Malabar coast are fast turning into the billious green of radical Islam. Roadside brick-and-mortar glass-fronted shrines dedicated to Virgin Mary with flickering candles lit by the devout and ancient temples with amazing hand-crafted brassware and bell metal utensils that once celebrated the Hinduness of Kerala are overshadowed by spanking new mosques that seem to be mushrooming all over the place. Not only are they built with Arab money -- donations by Muslim Malayalees working in Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, add up to only a fraction of the cost -- but they also symbolise the increasing influence of Arab 'culture', which is largely about visible manifestations of Islam and Islamism, that threatens to stamp out Kerala's rich indigenous culture rooted in India's civilisational past.
Huge billboards, advertising 'Arab Pardha' in English and Arabic, now jostle for space along with those advertising jewellery, new apartment blocks and investment schemes. The 'Arab Pardha' billboards are illustrated with larger than life images of women clad in head-to-toe burqas: They look shapeless and formless, their identity smothered by black fabric and their eyes barely visible through slits. "Arab Pardha", declares one billboard, "All pious women should wear it". The copywriter has it all wrong; it should have read, "All pious women should disappear behind it." For, that's what the burqa is meant for -- to make women disappear, make them invisible, deny them the right to exist as individuals. Any argument to the contrary is spurious and any religious edict cited in support of this grotesque suppression of individual liberty is specious. But there is a larger purpose behind propagating the 'Arab Pardha', or purdah, which is insidious and frightening for those who value freedom. This is one of the many instruments adopted by Islamists to push their agenda of radicalising Muslims and imposing their worldview on others without so much as even a token resistance by either civil society or the state. The darkness of the world in which they live is now being forced on us. Decades ago Nirad C Chaudhuri was to record in his memorable essay, The Continent of Circe, "Whenever in the streets of Delhi I see a Muslim woman in a burqa, the Islamic veil, I apostrophise her mentally: 'Sister! you are the symbol of your community in India.' The entire body of Muslims are under a black veil." The Continent of Circe was first published in 1966; forty-one years later, the community wants the black veil, the 'Arab Pardha', to envelope 'secular' India.
Kerala's 'Arab Pardha' billboards are a taunting reminder that in 'secular' India we must remain mute witness to the communalisation of culture, politics and society by peddlers of Islamism and its offensive agenda that is rooted in the most obnoxious interpretation of what Mohammed preached millennia ago. Even the economy has not been spared: Islamic banking, Islamic investments and Islamic financial instruments have surreptitiously entered this country under the benign gaze of an indulgent UPA Government whose Prime Minister spends sleepless nights agonising over the plight of Islamic terrorists and demands that all Government initiatives must be anchored in his perverse 'Muslims first' policy. The Prime Minister's admirers claim he is a "sensitive person" who is easily moved by the "plight of the helpless". Had he been moved by the pathetic sight of a Muslim woman, as much an Indian as all of us, forced to wear an 'Arab Pardha', his claimed sensitivities would have carried conviction. But such expression of sympathy, if not resolve to combat the insidious gameplan of Islamists inspired by hate-mongers and preachers of intolerance who draw their sustenance from the fruit of the poison tree of Wahaabism that flourishes in the sterile sands of Arabia, would demand a great degree of intellectual integrity and moral courage. The Prime Minister may be an "accidental politician", but he is a practitioner of politics of cynicism. For that, you neither need intellectual integrity nor moral courage.
Every time there is criticism of the Islamic veil, which comes in various forms of indignity -- the hijab, the niqab, the burqa, the chador -- whether from within or outside the Muslim community, we hear the frayed argument: It's a matter of personal choice; it's an expression of religiosity; it's culture-specific; it's a minority community's right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. All that and more is balderdash, not least because there is no Quranic injunction that mandates a Muslim woman to wear an 'Islamic' veil. Just as there is nothing Quranic about the cruel and mind-numbing practice of female circumcision which is carried out in the name of Islam and to force women to be pious and faithful! Given the nature of the community's social hierarchy and the grip of the mullahs, rarely does a woman protest, leave alone rebel. Those who do, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian activist whose book The Caged Virgin provides a revealing insight into Islamism's warped religio-political ideology, are hounded and live in perpetual fear of losing their lives. Blasphemy is not tolerated by those who live in a world darker than the darkest burqa, a world in which even Barbie wears the Islamic veil lest her plastic modesty be compromised.
But this is not only about the denial of an individual's liberty, nor is it about the suppression of human rights in the name of faith. It is about the in-your-face declaration of Islamists that they can have their way without so much as lifting their little finger. It is a laughable sight to watch Malayalees trying to navigate crowded streets in Kochi wearing white Arab gelabayas, the loose kaftan like dress that along with the kafeyah has become a symbol of trans-national radical Islam, their 'Arab Pardha' clad wives and daughters in tow. But it is not a laughable matter.
Increasingly, we are witnessing a shifting of loyalties from Malabar to Manipur. Faith in India is being transplanted by belief in Arabia. This is not good news for those who believe in the Indian nation.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=kanchan%2Fkanchan128%2Etxt&writer=kanchan

November 4, 2007.