A Moroccan theologian promotes young girls’ weddings

My translation of the news published by Spanish newspaper El PAIS:

A nine-year old girl gives “better results in bed than a 20-year-old girl”. In the Islamic world, specially in the Arabic peninsula, the weddings between girls and adult men are relatively normal, but the Muslim theologians do not use to justify it in a so crude way as the Moroccan theologian Mohammed ben Abderraman al Maghraoui.

He published a fatwa earlier this month in which he legalises the union between a young girl and an adult man. “We have been told, and we have seen by ourselves, that girls this age give better results than the adult women”, he states. “So, they are as able as 20-year-old girls to wed themselves”.

Al Maghraoui, a reknown Salafist sheik, author of half a dozen teology books, wrote and published the fatwa in the webpage of his association “Preaching and Sunna in the Quram”. His critics state that probably ha has published it to protect some friend who has been wed in secret.

His statement has provoked a great scandal in Morocco, but the authorities have not said oficially anything about this subject. The radical theologian considers as a basis for his fatwa, the example of the prophet Mohammed. Aixa, he remembers, was only six when he was engaged to her, although he didn’t marry her till she was nine.

“There are vicious teologians who are able to use religion to promote paedophilia”, writes the socialist newspaper Al Ittihad al Ichtiraki. “Yes, he is promoting paedophilia”, says Najia Adib, director of the association Don’t touch my sons, who is fighting in Morocco against it. Even the Islamist MP Abdelbari Zemzmi, an ex-imam, considers as “perverse”, the fatwa because “since the Prophet’s times the social reality has changed”.

A Rabat’s lawyer, Mourad Bakouri, has denounced Al Maghraoui under the new Moroccan Law, which states that the minimum legal age to wed is 18 and makes it difficult to be repealed. But its application has several problems in a very conservative society.

In an effort to prevent the proliferation of fatwas, which in some cases are absurd, the Superior Council of Ulemas assures that only its members are collectively qualified to issue them. That’s why it’s surprising that none of them has said anything about Al Maghraoui’s initiative. It’s also surprising that the Prosecuting Office has not undertaken any proceedings considering that the fatwa is calling to break the law.

Un teólogo marroquí promueve las bodas con niñas · ELPAÍS.com

via Cinco Dias.

Jihad Watch has reported that Al Maghraoui has said that he is a confirmed theologian and that he has not made this up: “It is the prophet who said that before me”. And continued:

“Those who criticise me, like the press or Moroccan television as well as the lawyer who filed the complaint (against me), are part of a secular attack against the Islamic nation and its theologians,” he added.

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