"When he arrived, I was dressed, packed and ready to leave." "They acted innocent in front of my grandfather," Fayrouz recalled. I called my father and he called my grandfather." Her grandfather, who lived in the same town, came immediately. "He wanted to sleep with me," Fayrouz said. Scared, she ran into a bedroom and locked herself inside. However, after the wedding, when they reached her husband's home, he started to flirt with her and ordered her to get into his bed. He paid $2,000 for her dowry, with $400 more at a future date. "Or else, I would never have married her off."ĭue to her extreme youth, Fayrouz's husband had to sign a document promising not to consummate their marriage until she reached puberty. "We needed the money from the dowry," said her father, Ahmed Haider Sayed. Their shy daughter, a shade under 4 feet tall, became their only source of income. But the money raised was not enough to pay their debts to the hospital and relatives. The family sold their belongings after fleeing airstrikes in the northern city of Saada last year. Sudarsan Raghavan reports from Khamer, Yemen, for the Washington Post about Fayrouz Ahmed Haider, 10 or 11 years old:įayrouz's mother needed a blood transfusion. Marrying off young daughters for the dowry in Yemen: As civil war grinds on in Yemen and families become destitute, one option to decrease expenses and raise capital is to marry off pre-pubescent girls. In another case, a child bride who had been handed over by her father in exchange for a taxi bled to death after being forced to have sex days after her wedding. Another man married off his daughter three times in two years for repeated dowries, all before she turned 18. "Families also seek dowry payments to cope with conflict-related hardship."Ī father ran out of cash while buying qat - leaves habitually chewed as a stimulant in Yemen - so he gave his daughter to the dealer in marriage. "Parents marry off their daughters to be relieved of the cost of their care or because they believe a husband's family can offer better protection," UNICEF said. UNICEF reported in March, as paraphrased by the Associated Press, thatĮarly marriage in Yemen has become "alarmingly widespread." In a survey conducted in September in six provinces, 72 percent of female respondents said they got married before 18 - compared with around 50 percent in surveys before the war - and about 44 percent said they were wedded before they turned 15, the organization said. , fueled by a war that has thrown society into turmoil. Young Girls Married off in War-Torn Yemen: Child marriages are increasing drastically in Yemen, due to the civil war and the poverty and the displacement it caused. According to the Islamic Sharia she was publicly stoned to death this afternoon." Meanwhile, the offending second husband fled. She admitted she illegally married a second husband. Mohamed Abu Abdalla, Al-Shabaab's ruler in Jubba, explained that "Her legal husband brought the case to the court.
Somali mother of eight stoned to death for taking a second husband: Somalia's Al-Shabaab had Habiba Ali Isak, 30 and the mother of eight children, publicly stoned to death in the southern town of Sakow, Jubba, for having cheated on her husband by taking a second husband. No, studying psychology at the in Ontario, Canada. Where might this have taken place: Nigeria, Yemen or Afghanistan? (June 27, 2021)Ĭhristian man converts to Islam to marry a Muslim woman whose face he had never seen despite their knowing each other for 4 years. Husband murdered by second wife to prevent his taking a third wife: Polyandry implies disgruntled wives sometimes, they take matters into their own hands, as happened in India to an Islamic teacher when his wife castrated him, leading to his death.
Me: Difficult to absorb such appalling, inhumane behavior. Then they dumped her body in a garbage container. Her parents responded by murdering the girl "in cold blood." An unknown assailant raped a five-year-old girl. I have made sure only to include instances in this weblog entry that represent a general outlook, and not just a single person's idiosyncrasy, anecdotes that reflect the Shari'a or societal consensus, not deviants and outcasts.įive-year-old girl honor killed by her parents: Here are some examples of customs and social attitudes from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head. (The term termagant sums up the surprising way Westerners saw Muslim women before the seventeenth century.) Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality.