US Government Approved Thousands Of Child Bride
Requests: “Middle Easterners Had Highest Percentage Of Approved Petitions”, by
Robert Spencer, 1/14/19.
Thousands of requests by men
originally from other countries, including Pakistan, to bring in child and
adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past
decade, according to government data obtained by AP news agency. In one case, a
49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.
Of course they had the highest
percentage of approved petitions. The government didn’t want to appear
“Islamophobic,” and sacrificed the well-being of these girls to that fear.
Islamic tradition records that Muhammad
consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, and the
resultant fact that child marriage is accepted in wide swaths of the Islamic
world. Child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law.
Turkey’s directorate of religious
affairs (Diyanet) said in January 2018 that
under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry.
“Islam has no age barrier in marriage
and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this” — Ishaq Akintola,
professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria
“There is no minimum marriage age for
either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to
marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”
— Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi,
Iraqi expert on Islamic law
There is no minimum age for marriage and
that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.” — Dr. Salih bin Fawzan,
prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council “Islam
does not forbid marriage of young children.” —
Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology
Hadiths that Muslims consider
authentic record that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad
wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage:
“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).
Another tradition has Aisha herself
recount the scene: The Prophet engaged me when I was a
girl of six (years). We went to Medina and stayed at the home of Bani-al-Harith
bin Khazraj. Then I got ill and my hair fell down. Later on my hair grew
(again) and my mother, Um Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with
some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she
wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of
the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became all right, she
took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the
house.
There in the house I saw some Ansari women who said, “Best wishes and
Allah’s Blessing and a good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they
prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah’s Apostle came to me in the
forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of
nine years of age. (Bukhari 5.58.234).
Muhammad was at this time fifty-four
years old.
Marrying young girls was not all
that unusual for its time, but because in Islam Muhammad is the supreme example
of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this unto today.
And so in April 2011, the Bangladesh Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini declared that
those trying to pass a law banning child marriage in that country were putting
Muhammad in a bad light: “Banning child marriage will cause challenging the
marriage of the holy prophet of Islam, [putting] the moral character of the
prophet into controversy and challenge.”
He added a threat: “Islam permits
child marriage and it will not be tolerated if any ruler will ever try to touch
this issue in the name of giving more rights to women.” The Mufti said that
200,000 jihadists were ready to sacrifice their lives for any law restricting
child marriage.
Likewise the influential website
Islamonline.com in December 2010 justified child marriage by invoking not only
Muhammad’s example, but the Qur’an as well:
The Noble Qur’an has also mentioned
the waiting period [i.e. for a divorced wife to remarry] for the wife who has
not yet menstruated, saying: “And those who no longer expect menstruation among
your women, if you doubt, then their period is three months, and [also for]
those who have not menstruated” [Qur’an 65:4]. Since this is not negated later,
we can take from this verse that it is permissible to have sexual intercourse
with a prepubescent girl. The Qur’an is not like the books of jurisprudence
which mention what the implications of things are, even if they are prohibited.
It is true that the prophet entered into a marriage contract with A’isha when
she was six years old, however he did not have sex with her until she was nine
years old, according to al-Bukhari.
Other countries make Muhammad’s
example the basis of their laws regarding the legal marriageable age for girls.
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.”
According to Amir Taheri in The
Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (pp. 90-91),
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was
twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine
blessing,” and advised the faithful to give their own daughters away
accordingly: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first
blood in your house.” When he took power in Iran, he lowered the legal
marriageable age of girls to nine, in accord with Muhammad’s example.
“US govt approved thousands of child
bride requests,” AP, January 12,
2019 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
WASHINGTON: Thousands of requests by men
originally from other countries, including Pakistan, to bring in child and
adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past
decade, according to government data obtained by AP news agency. In one case, a
49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.
The approvals are legal: the Immigration
and Nationality Act does not set minimum age requirements. And in weighing
petitions for spouses or fiancées, US Citizenship and Immigration Services goes
by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and whether the marriage
would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.
Take a look: 21pc girls in Pakistan
become victim of child marriage, WHO reports
But the data raises questions about
whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and about how US
laws may be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced
marriage. Marriage between adults and minors is not uncommon in the US, and
most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.
There were more than 5,000 cases of
adults petitioning on behalf of minors and nearly 3,000 examples of minors
seeking to bring in older spouses or fiancés, according to the data requested
by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in 2017 and compiled into a report.
Some victims of forced marriage say the
lure of a US passport combined with lax US marriage laws are partly fueling the
petitions.
“My passport ruined my life,” said Naila
Amin, a dual citizen from Pakistan who grew up in New York City. She was
forcibly married at 13 in Pakistan and applied for papers for her 26-year-old
husband to come to the country.
“People die to come to America,” she
said. “I was a passport to him. They all wanted him here, and that was the way
to do it.”
Amin, now 29, said she was betrothed to
her first cousin Tariq when she was just eight and he was 21. The petition was
eventually terminated after she ran away.
She said the ordeal cost her a
childhood. She was in and out of foster care and group homes, and it took a while
to get her life on track.
“I was a child. I want to know: why
weren’t any red flags raised? Whoever was processing this application, they
don’t look at it? They don’t think?” she asked.
Over that period, there were 5,556
approvals for those seeking to bring in minor spouses or fiancées, and 2,926
approvals by minors seeking to bring in older spouses, according to the data.
Additionally, there were 204 approvals of applications by minors seeking to
bring in minor spouses….
USCIS didn’t know how many of the
approvals were granted by the State Department, but overall only about 2.6 per
cent of spousal or fiancée claims are rejected.
Separately, the data show some 4,749
minor spouses or fiancées received green cards to live in the US over that same
10-year period.
The country where most requests came
from was Mexico, followed by Pakistan, Jordan, the Dominican Republic and
Yemen. Middle Eastern nationals had the highest percentage of overall approved
petitions.
Comments
Sharia is not
compatible with US Law. Actions by the US federal government are not consistent
with State Laws governing marriage age requirements. This will have to be
fixed. We’ve done this before to get
Mormons to abandon polygamy to comply with US Law.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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