This is so messed-up I don't know how to deal with it (how do you address "The father is said to have married the child to a friend to pay a financial debt. It had been stipulated, however, that the groom could not have sex with her until she reached puberty" for crying out loud, without losing your marbles completely at the fucked-upness of it?)
I will make one observation, however:
Having (tried to) read the Qur'an for myself (I never finished it, but I did read most of it), my understanding of the dowry system as it appears in the Qur'an is that the dowry was not supposed to be a payment to the parents, but instead it was supposed to be like a trust fund to be managed on behalf of the wife, who would then be able to use it to support herself if the husband ever decided to divorce her (which would, in a heavily patriarchal society, have left a woman without other means of supporting herself). That's what it looked to me like it said (although I obviously could not argue that case very strongly against someone whose religion it is). The Guardian report says, "the issue is complicated by different interpretations of sharia law and a lack of legal certainty."
0 things wot people said:
Post a Comment
Comments Moderation Policy
This blog is intended to be a place where I can develop my thoughts freely and get free and honest responses. Essentially, it is my safe space, and for that reason I have elected to maintain this blog as a moderated space. However, I am opposed in general to censorship and believe that usually the best way to kill a bad idea is with a better one, so very few comments will be rejected. Comments designed to cause offence for the sake of it (e.g. abusive or inflammatory remarks with no other content), or else those that I feel cross a boundary of human decency, are most likely to be rejected.