From Iraq's new religious code, which sets marriage at puberty, to minority girls married off in Pakistan, child marriage keeps finding religious backing. Its defenders have scripture to lean on. Quran 65:4 sets the waiting period after divorce for women "who have not menstruated", which classical commentators read as including girls before puberty. And according to Sahih al-Bukhari (5133, 5158) and Sahih Muslim (1422), Aisha was six when the Prophet married her, with her father acting as guardian, and nine when the marriage was consummated. For its defenders, the precedent is sacred. For the girls, it is a sentence.
Two Hindu sisters, aged 13 and 14, allegedly abducted, converted to Islam and married off in Pakistan's Sindh province, begged a court to let them go home. The court sent them to a safe house. In Sindh, marrying a child is a crime. Converting one, as clerics keep reminding lawmakers, has no age limit.
Five years after the Taliban's return, a civil society speaker told the UN Security Council that being a woman in Afghanistan is now a crime. In Geneva, NGOs are pleading with the Human Rights Council to at least keep talking about it: renew the rapporteur, keep the dialogues, launch the investigative mechanism. The rapporteur, for his part, has been banned from the country since 2024.
Since 2025, Iraqi couples can trade the civil family law for a Shia religious code. It sets marriage at puberty, accepts weddings with no witness and no register, hands children to their fathers at seven, and lets a woman divorce only if she is abandoned, unpaid or repeatedly beaten. Iraqi women fought to make the reform less terrible. Six months later, parliament made it worse.
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