In Yemen an eight-year-old is raped by her husband: Just following the example of the Prophet (blessed be his name)
It is nice, isn’t it, when people try to emulate the life of the Prophet (blessed be his name and all of that) – in principle, that is.
Of course, if you’re a poor Yemeni eight-year-old girl it is a bit of a pity that Mohammed was a serious trend-setter when it comes to child marriage and, as a consequence, formalized child rape:
SANAA (AFP) A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year.
“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance. Nojud was a second grader in primary school when the marriage took place two and a half months ago. “They asked me to sign the marriage contract and remain in my father’s house until I was 18. But a week after signing, my father and my mother forced me to go live with him.”
Her former husband, 28-year-old Faez Ali Thameur, said he married the child “with her consent and that of her parents” but that he did not object to her divorce petition. In response to a question from Judge Mohammed al-Qadhi, he acknowledged that the “marriage was consummated, but I did not beat her.”
Dressed in traditional black, Nojud said she would now go to live in the home of her maternal uncle and did not want to see her father.
Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries, has no law governing the minimum age of marriage. The girl’s lawyer, Shadha Nasser, said Nojud’s case was not unique. “I believe there are thousands of similar cases,” she said, adding that civil society groups are pressing parliament to set the minimum age for marriage at 18.
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