How does a Muslim man understand marriage when he can purchase a wife for a small sum of money -- a teenage girl or younger -- who was kidnapped, isolated, forced to recite the shahada (which is not what she was raised to believe) and given to a husband she neither knows nor respects? She will have no access to anyone she loves, has been traumatised and treated as chattel, and wasn't even thinking of marriage in the near future, but was dedicated to her education -- an education her husband will consider reprehensible and forbidden? She may even be introduced into a household with other wives, women who may resent or distain her.
I am trying to plumb the psychology of a family unit created on such a foundation, how the husband and wife will communicate, how she is supposed to raise any children they have, and how she can find support and affection in the extended family and community. It doesn't take much thought to realise that dysfunction will remain at the heart of such unions -- at least by our standards. And are our standards so unreasonable, culturally-conditioned, and myopic that we're unaware that diversity allows for a multiplicity of bonds?
If Islam is the true religion, then the freedom and happiness of the wife is of no interest to either Allah or his male subjects. Whatever support and affection girls and women receive would seem to exist despite their deposit of faith, rather than because of it. But if Christianity is true, and the body of research in the realm of psychology and child development are to be taken at face value, then we have a serious problem with the misogyny, violence, and oppression that permeate Islamic culture -- beginning in the marital bed.
Just take some time and imagine the future of those kidnapped girls: their isolation, their fears, their new husbands, new faith, the children who will come of the unions, and the tenor of those homes. That is what Boko Haram seeks in rejecting the west, because they're not just rejected our decadent side, but the truth and beauty of marriage and family. Poor dears!