RIYADH – Abdul Aziz Aal Al-Sheikh, Grand Mufti of the Kingdom, has said girls as young as 10 years old can be married.
In a speech late Monday, the Grand Mufti said Islamic Shariah law allows the practice of pre-teen girls getting married, and that critics of the practice were doing the girls “an injustice,” Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper said.
“We hear often in the media about the marriage of minors. We must know that Shariah law is not unjust for women,” Aal-Al-Sheikh was quoted as saying.
“If it is said that a woman below 15 cannot be married, that is wrong. If a girl exceeds 10 or 12 then she is eligible for marriage, and whoever thinks she is too young, then he or she is wrong and has done her an injustice.”
The Grand Mufti’s comment came in the wake of several well-publicized cases of young girls being married to men sometimes old enough to be their grandfathers.
On Monday a court in Taif allowed an 11-year-old girl to separate from her 75-year-old husband after the girl’s mother petitioned the court. The girl’s father had arranged the marriage in exchange for a dowry.
In December a court at Onaiza, 220 km north of Riyadh, rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty.
Human rights groups are fighting the old practice of children being married off to much older men by their parents and seek to establish a legal minimum age for women to be married.
On Sunday, the National Human Rights Commission condemned marriages of minor girls, saying such marriages are an “inhumane violation.”