Why or why is it always Islam that appears to be determined to drag everybody back into the stone age. India Today reports …
Kerala’s nine prominent Muslim organisations led by the Muslim League have decided to approach the Supreme Court to exclude Muslim women from the law prescribing minimum marital age. According to them, the present Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 which prescribes 18 as women’s legal marital age and 21 for men, violates Muslims’ fundamental right to practise their religion.
First points here …this is not simply one fringe group, but rather a collective demand from nine prominent Muslim organisations.
Second point here … this is not a call to reduce the minimum a bit … from say 18 to 16. Instead it is a demand to have no minimum at all.
What we also know is that of the 3404 under-age marriages in the district, almost all of them, 2827, where Muslim.
The primary concern here is that apart from the rather obvious physical and mental issues for girls who are married off at an early age, it also greatly re-enforces a culture of misogyny. V P Suhara, a prominent activist for Muslim women’s rights, makes the following observations in the article …
“We too will approach the supreme court to defeat this move. This is orthodoxy’s attempt to drive back the Muslim women who have come a long way in education and other fields in recent times. The clergy and the orthodoxy want Muslim women to remain uneducated so that they can continue with their traditional ways of exploitation like having multiple wives, divorce at their free will or denying the divorced women maintenance etc”.
Indeed yes, when faced with the irrational demands of clerics that strive to keep humans in submission to ignorance and superstition, the correct response is “No”.