Muslim adult man marries 8-year-old girl

Robert Spencer points to an awful incident of recent where a grown Muslim man forcibly married an 8-year-old girl, using the Koran to justify his actions:

Yet another child has been married because of Islamic laws that no one wishes to admit exist, much less counter in any way.

The BBC reported recently that “an eight-year-old girl, who had been missing for six months, was found living with a man who said he was her husband.” This man, identified as Sheikh Mahmoud, “initially said he was solely teaching the girl the Quran. But after legal complaints were filed, he changed his statement, saying he had married the girl with her father’s consent.”

He did this based on Islamic law: “When asked by the BBC how he justified marrying an eight-year-old, Sheikh Mahmoud said that the traditions of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, along with that of the Shafi’i school of thought, allowed child marriage.” The BBC, as woke as ever, and thus determined to defend the image of Islam in every possible way, begged to differ: “After the BBC questioned his reasoning – citing opposition from numerous Somali Islamic scholars – Sheikh Mahmoud maintained that he would not abandon the marriage.”

The BBC’s “opposition from numerous Sunni Islamic scholars” notwithstanding, Sheikh Mahmoud is not some extremist or eccentric. He is acting upon standard, basic Islam. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, and the resultant fact that child marriage and the sexualization of children are taken for granted in wide swaths of the Islamic world: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88). Muhammad was at this time fifty-four years old. Numerous other early Islamic traditions state the same thing.

Marrying young girls was not all that unusual in Muhammad’s time. But because, in Islam, Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this even today. For that reason, Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”

Don't expect the BBC to actually champion the girl in distress, however. It's an almost forgone conclusion news outlets like them will soon sweep this under the rug again, and in doing so, allow repulsive perversions like these to continue unopposed for years to come. This is utterly disgusting, and it must be addressed by anybody who seriously cares about the well being of young girls.