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Islam and the Destruction of Childhood
This week, Turkeys? Daily Millyet newspaper quoted a survey released by prominent researcher, Tuncer Gunay on some shocking figures of an epidemic of sexually abused children. He revealed that some 350,000 to 400,000 children are believed to have been sexually abused over the past 20 years by first-degree relatives or other close kin. Of these incidents, just 600 were referred to the country’s courts. He further stated that 7,000 children were abused in 2010 alone.
The culture of child abuse and child marriage in Islam has long been a thorn in the side of the so-called moderate Muslims attempting to legitimize those very actions mimicking their prophet Mohammed. The Hadith says that Mohammed married Aisha when he was 52 and she was 6. He ?thighed? her between the ages of 6 and 9 and as no child of 9 is capable of consenting to sexual intercourse, he subsequently raped her.
Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Mughirah Ibn Bardizbah al-Bukhari was a Persian Sunni scholar who authored the Hadith collection named ?Sahih Bukhari?, a collection which Sunni Muslims regard as the most authentic of all Hadith compilations. As 85 percent of the worlds Muslims are Sunni, 1.6 billion people hold Bukhari in high regard.
Bukhari Volume 5, Book 58, number 23,
narrated Aisha:
The Prophet engaged me when I was a girl of six years. We went to Medina and stayed at the home of Bani-al-Harith bin Khazraj. Then I got ill and my hair fell down. Later on my hair grew (again) and my mother, Um Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became all right, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari women who said, “Best wishes and Allah’s Blessing and a good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah’s Apostle came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age.
Mohammed also dreamt of Aisha before aged 6 as noted in Bukhari Volume 5, Book 58, number 235,
narrated Aisha:
That the Prophet said to her, “You have been shown to me twice in my dream. I saw you pictured on a piece of silk and someone said (to me). ‘This is your wife.’ When I uncovered the picture, I saw that it was yours. I said, ‘If this is from Allah, it will be done.”
Other sources such as Ibn Hisham, Tabari, Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Sa’d, Ibn Hanbal, all maintain that Aisha was betrothed to Mohammed when she was 6, and the marriage was consummated 3 years later.
The abuse of children isn?t exclusive to Turkey though as we can find countless cases of young, often pre pubescent girls being raped or sold or married to grown men.
In parts of Ethiopia and Nigeria, quite a number of girls are married before the age of 15 and some girls are married as young as the age of 7. Yemen is full of child brides. Roughly half of Yemeni girls are married before 18, some as young as eight.
In Saudi Arabia clerics have justified the marriage of girls as young as 9, with sanction from the judiciary. There are no laws defining the minimum age for marriage in Saudi Arabia, and girls as young as eight years are often married.
Egypt, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, India, and the Middle East: In the rural villages of these countries many young girls are rarely allowed out of their homes unless it is to work in the fields or to get married. These uneducated girls are often married off at the young age of 11. Some families allow girls who are only 7 years old to marry. It is very unusual for a girl to reach the age of 16 and not be married.
Thousands of Yemeni women, their faces covered in religious veils, demonstrated outside the Parliament to oppose proposed 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,” Answering calls by Muslim clerics who oppose the proposal on grounds it goes against Islamic Sharia law, the protesters arrived in organized buses.
An Indonesian fifth-grader only identified as AG, had to run away and sneak into school to attend classes, after her father forced her to marry a 60-year-old man. AG was married by a cleric in front of their parents with an $11 dowry. She refused the marriage at first but their father beat her severely with a leather belt and punched her in the head.
A Yemeni girl named Elham Mahdi Shoi 12, died from internal bleeding from intercourse, 3 days after her wedding to a 23 year old man. The girl’s mother, Nijma Ahmed, 50, told a reporter that before her daughter lost consciousness, her husband had tied her up and forced himself on her. “She looked like she was butchered,” she said about her daughter’s injuries.
Egypt?s Former State Governor, Yeriman Bakura, 65, had married a thirteen-year-old Egyptian girl. The former Governor, now a Senator, paid a bride price of $100,000. He also divorced one of his wives to facilitate the marriage.
Mohammed is infamous for making up the rules as he went along, with no regard for the repercussions that his self-serving and perverted lifestyle would have, well over a millennia later.
Vin Ienco
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Originally published to Family Security Matters April 20, 2011.
