A Saudi religious scholar affirmed that marriage to a minor girl cannot be justified, even by invoking the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha at a young age.
Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manea, a member of the Council of Senior Scholars, made the remarks in comments published by Okaz newspaper after the marriage of an eighty-year-old man to a twelve-year-old girl whose mother planned to file a court case seeking a divorce for her daughter.
The scholar explained that today’s circumstances differ from those in the Prophet’s time, and that some historians have noted that the Prophet’s marriage to Aisha was not consummated until three years later. He stressed that child marriage today cannot be measured against the Prophet’s marriage because the conditions and social context are entirely different.
The case gained attention after media reports that the girl had been forced into marrying a man sixty-eight years older than her in Buraidah. The issue was also taken up by the Saudi Human Rights Commission, whose chairman said that the girl’s mother had requested support in seeking a ruling to dissolve the marriage.
