ISLAM ANSWERS - EARLY MARRIAGE Part 1

Several attacks have been raisedrecentlyagainst early marriage in Islam, which clearly result from ignoring facts about pre-modern society and Islam,or intentionally concealing them.

1)Age of Consentin History

Onesuch claim is that “Islam’s age of consentwas relatively low in history”.

  • First of all,early procreation was a necessity for human survival. Lifespan ranged from 20 to 30 years,[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] due to high death rates.[10] [11] [12] Even until the 18th century, 8 children were still needed by each fertile wife just to maintain the population.[13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] Also, sexual attraction accompanies puberty,[21] [22] which genetically ranges from ages 7 to 13 in women.[23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]So, whether one believes this instinct resulted from evolution, or part of God’s plan,procreation after puberty in history is natural and acceptable.
  • According to theJournal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, the “age of consent throughout history…usually coincided with the age of puberty” with “the absolute minimum at seven”.[31] Both that Journal and Encyclopedia Britannica state that age of consent laws were passed from Roman law to the Church to English Common Law,[32] [33]which states: “between 7 years and puberty there could be consent but not consummation”until puberty,with no parental consent required from the age of 12.[34]This was confirmed in 1877 by the US Supreme Court.[35] [36] Even today, 6 states and the District of Columbia allow this Common Law marriage, [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] and such marriages are then constitutionally recognized in all 50 states.[43]
  • Marriage as early as age 7, which was considered the “age of reason”,[44] [45]or directly after puberty was the norm for the vast majority of all human society even until the 19th century.[46] [47] [48] [49] [50]
  • 1300 years earlier, Islam’s minimum of 9 was 2 years higher, and also added the protection of requiring parental consent even after age 12.[51]
  • The delay ofpuberty in industrialized cities between 1700 and 1850does not disprovethe norm of early marriage in history, because that was an abnormal result of poor sanitation,[52] [53] [54] lack of exercise, and the vast introduction of cheap, un-nutritious cereal diets.[55] [56] [57]

As a result, not only was Islam’s age of consent higher than all pre-modern law, italso added the protection of requiring parental consent after age 12.

2)Psychological Maturity in History

The second claim is that “Islam allowed marriage at puberty in pre-modern times, which caused psychological harm because puberty was too young to give informed consent”.

  • The fact is that even until the 18th century, reaching puberty meant becoming an “adult”, in terms of maturity, behavior and responsibility, as stated in the Journal of Social History, Online Etymology Dictionary, Journal of Marriage and the Family, and numerous academic references.[58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63]
  • Children faced the daily struggle for physical and economic survival,[64] [65] [66] [67] [68] and while this type of “environmental stress” actually causes puberty at a younger age,[69] [70] [71] it is proven to have alsospeeded psychological maturity.[72] [73] [74] [75] [76]This maturity helped incoping with the responsibilities of early marriage and childbearing.
  • These responsibilitieswereindeed valued by society, including the most important founding father of the United States,[77]Benjamin Franklin.[78]
  • It was only in the industrial mid-18th century that psychological maturity started to delay,[79] due to side effects that are proven to delay maturity such as:increasing comforts of life, diminished parental guidance,[80] [81] [82] and that “children remained children longer to complete their education”.[83] [84] [85] [86]
  • It is therefore ridiculous to “demand late marriage in pre-modern society on the pretense of psychological harm”as it would have wiped out the human race for reasons that only arise for immature adolescents today.
  • Since psychological maturity and adulthood were reached atpubertyin pre-modern times, it is also naive to slander early marriage in history as:

1)Child sexual abuse: "the engagement of a child in sexual activities for which the child is developmentally unprepared and cannot give informed consent”.[87]

2)Pedophilia: the sexual attraction towards pre-pubescent children.[88] [89] [90]

As a result, early procreation was psychologically appropriate and even a valued benefit to society.

3)Risks of Early Procreationin History

The third claim is that “Islam allowed procreation at puberty in pre-modern times, which was more dangerous to the younger mothers”.

  • This attack cites a UNFPA study, butconcealsthat the study was for2contemporary impoverished nations, and that“almost all of these deaths are preventable” simply by providing access and transportation to hospitals.[91]The International Journal of Epidemiology states “studies implicate poverty, not maternal age, as the real threat to maternal and infant welfare”.[92] In pre-modern times, the high risk of childbirth,due to lack of medical knowledge and hygiene, affected all women regardless of age.[93]
  • In fact, early procreation was a genetically superior trait for population growth in pre-modern times for 2 reasons:

1)Women who have puberty earlier have children who grow up faster and weigh more.[94]

2)“Life history theory” states that in a less stable environment, “natural selection will favor individuals that reproduce earlier...within a population”.[95] [96]

As a result, early procreation was not harmful, but beneficialto newborns and genetics.

4)Early Marriage in Modern Times

The fourth claim is that “Islam allows marriage at pubertyin modern times, which causes sexual and psychological harm”.

  • First of all, it is untrue that Islamic age of consent is lower in modern times compared to other laws. For example, the US and other countries currently allow marriage well under the age of 16 with pregnancy, or parental or court approval.[97]In contrast, 17 Islamic countries have age of consent ranging from 15 to 18 years with parental consent,[98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] [110] [111] [112] [113] [114]which was raised specifically as animplementation ofIslamicLaw.[115] [116]
    In fact, because of the contemporary delay in maturity, marriage at puberty today would violate 6 basic Islamic rules:

1)“Rushd”, psychological maturity, or “prudent judgement” is required before marriage.[117] [118]

2)No one should harm anyone else.[119] [120] [121] [122]

3)People’s best interests must be observed.[123]

4)No one should bear any burden beyond their capacity.[124] [125] [126] [127] [128]

5)Governments and guardians are entrusted to act correctly.[129] [130] [131]

6)Compliance to “urf”, new social norms that are considered good.[132] [133] [134]

  • Secondly, it is untrue that Islamic marital law results in more harm in modern times compared to other laws. In fact, the Islamic requirement of marriage provides to every sexual relationship and its potential offspring the benefits of faithfulness, emotional support, mutual trust,commitment,[135] parental guidance and wide social support.[136]In addition, with a slightly lower average age of marriage, Islamic countries benefit from theearly marriage mentality, which is proven to result in psychological maturity at a relatively younger age.[137]
    On the other hand, non-Islamic societies permitand condone sexual activitiesyears before psychological maturity and the legal age of marriage,[138] whichcauses devastating sexualharm to adolescents, such as the following current US statistics:
  • 50% of child sexual abuse offenders are adolescents themselves,[139] committing sexual abuse, child pornography, child prostitution and incest,[140] using deception, force or coercion.[141]
  • 35% of all 17 year olds have been sexually abused.[142] [143]
  • 12% of all 14 year olds have had sex “involuntarily”.[144]
  • “Half of all new HIV infections occur among adolescents”.[145] [146]
  • 70% of 13 year olds who had sex said it was “against their will”.[147]
  • 7% of 12 year olds have had sex.[148] [149]
  • 90% of prostitutes were victims of child sexual abuse.[150][151][152]
  • “The average age at which girls first become victims of prostitution is 12-14”.[153]
  • Sexually active teenagers are 3 to 8 times as likely to attempt suicide.[154] [155]
  • 76% of unplanned teen mothers end up on welfare[156]
  • Every yearin the world’s richest countries, there are 1.25 million teen pregnancies and 500,000 teen abortions.[157]
  • Countries that chooselegalized prostitution as their solution, like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, end up withincreased rates of child prostitution andsex trafficking,[158] [159] [160] [161]child pornography,[162] [163]incest,[164][165]and even legal“beastiality”,sex with animals.[166] [167] [168] [169]
  • In modern times, the age of puberty has fallen [170] [171] below the age of psychological maturity,[172] [173][174] sexual values have greatly degraded,[175] and the late marriage mentality is delaying psychological maturity even further.[176] These 3 trends will continue to increase the above devastating sexual harm to adolescents in non-Islamic countries.
  • While extremely rare cases of marriage at puberty in Afghanistan’s countryside are exploited to attack all Muslims,it must be noted that even in Islamic countries that have not yet officially raised the minimum age of consent, they have done so in practice.Otherwise Islam’s critics would have publicizedmore than just a few cases from some isolated tent villages. More importantly,even such Islamic countries do not haveany of thesexual atrocities that are documented at alarmingly high ratios in the same countries attacking Islam.

As a result, Islam’s flexible marital law providesfar better protection than contemporary laws by prohibiting sexual activities prior to psychological maturity and then marriage.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion,Islam responsibly channels sexual instincts through marriage, with the prior condition of psychological maturity.And contrary to claims of improved morality, non-Islamic laws have alarmingly driven child sexual abuse and psychological harm to epidemic proportions.

Therefore, when such attacks against Islam are analyzed impartially, they reveal the perfect applicability of Islam’s solution from the 7th century until today, and the utter failure of any other system to provide any protection whatsoever to society’s youth. At best, these attacks are also found to be irresponsibly superficial due to the seriousness of this issue.

[1] James Trefil, "Can We Live Forever?" 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either (1996)
Bronze Age: 18

[2] Average Life Expectancy at Birth
“The average life expectancy in Classical Greece was 28...The average life expectancy in Classical Rome was 28”

[3] “Americans and their health - A little good news”, WIN Wyoming, November 2004
“During the Roman Empire, the average life expectancy of humans was about 22-25 years.”

[4] "old age" Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008
“In ancient Rome and medieval Europe the average life span is estimated to have been between 20 and 30 years.”

[5] Time traveller's guide to Medieval Britain
“The Middle Ages are a dangerous time... Average life expectancy is only 30.”

[6] A millennium of health improvement
“The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years.”

[7] “Commentary: The pitfalls of policy history. Writing the past to change the present”, S Ryan Johansson, Cambridge Groups for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge University
"For most of human history mortality was high and life expectancy low (between 20 and 30 years at birth)...”

[8] This Wonderful Lengthening of Lifespan, Bruce J. Klein, Immortality Institute, 2003
“In 1796, life expectancy hovered around 24 years.”

[9] It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years By Stephen Moore, Julian Lincoln Simon
“Throughout most of human history, death came at an early age--25 to 30 years was a typical lifespan. The essential element of the human condition was a day-to-say struggle to fend off death...Increasing life expectancy at birth from the lower 20s to the high 20s around 1750 took thousands of years. Over the next two centuries, life expectancy in the richest countries suddenly accelerated and tripled. From the mid-18th century to today, life spans in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to about 75 years.”

[10] “The End of Life: Medical Considerations - Causes Of Death”
“In the 1800s and early 1900s, infectious (communicable) diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis, and diphtheria were the leading causes of death.”

[11] “Commentary: The pitfalls of policy history. Writing the past to change the present”, S Ryan Johansson, Cambridge Groups for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge University
"...most people were too poor, and therefore too poorly nourished, to resist the relentless onslaughts of disease, particularly infectious disease. In 18th century Western Europe, agricultural development increased the food supply and let ordinary people buy more and better food. Better nutrition increased their resistance to infectious disease, and reduced death rates, all without the assistance of medical care.”

[12] “Health: A millennium of health improvement”, December 27, 1998, BBC News
“Childbirth was less sanitary, and put the mother at a high risk of fatal infection. Complications in the birth were more frequently fatal too, as, although midwives existed, they had little medical knowledge and their hygiene was poor.”

[13] "Saga Background: Women", Theban Tribunal Sourcebook
“...Early marriage and procreation of children was the norm in Byzantium...One reason for the promotion of teenage marriage was the emphasis on the virginity of the bride. Another, unstated reason may have been the desire to make the most of the childbearing years; because of the high rate of infant mortality, a woman had to bear many children to insure the survival of a few. Furthermore, since many women died young (if they survived infancy, they had an average life expectancy of about thirty-five years), it behooved them to marry and begin producing children as soon as physically possible.”

[14] THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION, Keith Montgomery, Department of Geography and Geology, University of Wisconsin Marathon County
"STAGE ONE is associated with pre Modern times, and is characterized by a balance between birth rates and death rates...The high rate of birth (even higher if one were to adjust it for women of childbearing age) could be due any or all of the factors that are associated with high fertility even today in many less developed countries. With a high death rate among children, there would be little incentive in rural societies to control fertility except in the most unbearable of circumstances...STAGE TWO sees a rise in population caused by a decline in the death rate while the birth rate remains high, or perhaps even rises slightly. The decline in the death rate in Europe began in the late 18th.C. in northwestern Europe and spread over the next 100 years to the south end east."

[15] Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Population and demography Version 1.0 April 2006 Walter Scheidel Stanford University
“High mortality logically implies high fertility. For instance, a mean life expectancy at birth of 25 years compels – on average – every woman surviving to menopause to give birth to approximately five children to maintain existing population size. The corresponding rate was higher still for married women: one reconstruction posits a lifetime mean of 8.4 births for continuously married women in Roman Egypt (Frier 2000: 801).“

[16] Crisis In The Family: Connecticut And The Nation, Lou Ratté, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
“In concrete terms, historians observe, the American woman of 1800 bore, on the average, seven or eight children; the American woman of 1900 bore three or four...You can start with an initial population of 100. Half of them are women. Those fifty women have to produce 200 children in twenty years. If all the women produced an equal number of children, and all the children lived, the number of children necessary would be four. However, ten percent of the women don’t marry. Eliminate five women. Ten percent of the women who do marry prove to be infertile. Eliminate another five women. Finally, ten percent of the women lose their husbands before they can produce children. Eliminate another ten percent. You are left with thirty-five women. These women could produce 200 children if each bore 5.7, or between five and six children each. However, ten percent of the children, or twenty, die as infants, and another ten percent do not live into adulthood to produce children of their own. Add another twenty. You now have 240 births necessary. Remember, though, that of the 200 children, half of which will be female, that you want, thirty percent will not be able to do their share of reproducing. You need an additional sixty children to ensure that the population can continue to double. So, you need 300 children. Divide that number by the available thirty-five women. Each woman must bear between eight and nine children...Between seven and eight is the figure that demographic historians estimate was the average for number of children in the American family in 1800”

[17] William Faulkner, a twentieth- century American novelist once wrote, “The past is not dead, Sep 2004
"In the 17th century, the majority of people worked as farmers. In this profession, it was beneficial to have as many people helping as possible in order to maximize profit. Thus, the average number of children per household was 8.3 compared to today’s 1.3 children, according to 'Colonial America to 1763'."

[18] The Real Population Problem: Too Few Working, Too Many Retired, William Poole and David C. Wheelock, The Regional Economist, April 2005
“For centuries, the world’s population grew slowly, as high rates of mortality largely offset high birth rates.”

[19] The Peopling of America, Digital History
“Child Mortality in New England: 180-200 of every l,000 died first year, 35-40 percent failed to reach adulthood”

[20] Unit 5: Human Population Dynamics // Section 2: Mathematics of Population Growth
“Until the mid-19th century birth rates were only slightly higher than death rates, so the human population grew very slowly.The industrial era changed many factors that affected birth and death rates, and in doing so, it triggered a dramatic expansion of the world's population”

[21] “Molecular investigations into complex behavior: Lessons from sexual orientation studies,” Human Biology, Apr 1998 by Pattatucci, Angela M
"Remarkably, the mean age of phenotypic expression of sexual orientation, assessed in terms of the age of the first romantic/sexual attraction to another person, was constant at approximately 10 years"

[22] Puberty May Start at 6 As Hormones Surge, By HARA ESTROFF MARANO, July 1, 1997
“...the adrenal sex steroids do what sex hormones typically do, influence behavior as well as the body...Using data from three separate studies, they said that sexual attraction first manifested itself in the fourth grade, from the ages of 9 to 10...In Dr. Herdt's study, the mean age of first-recalled sexual attraction was 9.6 for men, 10.1 for women. In the cancer institute's studies, the mean age of first sexual attraction was 10 to 10.5...Dr. Herdt recalled 'being struck by the significant number of teens in our study who made remarks about attractions' occurring at 9 or 10. 'I thought that was strange, certainly inconsistent with the literature,' Dr. Herdt said. 'But many of the teens specifically placed their experiences in the fourth grade'.”