This British newspaper gives a searing account of a woman who was married at the age of five and given to her husband when she was fourteen.
Dressed in a fancy new outfit, little Samina Shah thought she was getting ready for her birthday party. Instead she was being married off — having just turned five. The Islamic ceremony effectively ended her childhood and paved the way for years of abuse.
She used to dread evenings when she would have to tearfully face the advances of her husband. The marriage was eventually consummated against her will after she suffered a horrific beating. After three months it was decided she should live under lock and key back in England until she turned 16.
It is important to sift out the various elements and to try to understand what part Islam played in the arrangement. Her parents were clearly Muslims, the man who contracted the marriage (there is no account of his age) was also a Muslim. Pakistan, the cultural home to them all (although the bride and her family lived in England) had been Muslim for well over a thousand years.
Sadly, when she tried one avenue of escape, she was propelled right back into her old life:
Samina breaks down and sobs: “I was so upset, I thought everyone had abandoned me.” Contemplating suicide, she started writing a text of apology to her daughter. She said: “Then I thought, how could I? She needed me — I couldn’t leave her.”
Samina found herself outside a church where she knew the priest. She said: “I was so disheartened I wanted to abandon everything I had been taught in childhood. “I thought the best thing I could do was to convert. Maybe being a Christian would give me peace.”
But the priest told her Islam had not let her down — people had. He contacted a Muslim woman who gave Samina a bed for the night and a shoulder to cry on.
This is the crux of the matter: who defines Islam? Nice people can say that the unpleasant parts are unjustified and that they must be purged from the faith. But who has the authority to do that? Faithful Muslims are entirely correct: if Mohammed is the penultimate prophet of Allah (the one true god) and the model for Muslims, then no one can tinker with the "deposit of faith."
It is an all or nothing equation, just as in Christianity. Either Muhammed is the model (and child marriage is completely licit) or Jesus Christ is the model (and marriage has an entirely different meaning). Modernism is just as wrong for Islam as it is for Christianity. If God spoke, then man must comply, if God didn't speak, than no one needs to comply -- and it's abominable to try to recreate a more palatable religion in "his" name.
Muslim feminists have worked hard to say that Islam is the one true religion but that its cultural accretions must be changed. What they cannot explain is how the culture of Muhammed was incorporated into the faith from its very inception and codified through shari'a law as the most perfect expression of Islam. Just as you cannot have Christianity without Jesus, you cannot have Islam without Muhammed. Modernists in both case try to dismiss the lives lived by those two as "victims of their own times and culture," and subsequently work to "sanitise" each religion of the parts they don't like.
Christians take Christ at his word; Muslims take Mohammed at his word. The bottom line is: Which word is true, and which faith honours the true dignity and vocation of woman?
