teen and teenage girls to elderly men on the rise, we shouldn't be taken aback if one day the Ministry of Education were to appoint a permanent midwife to each and every girls' primary school across the land. It is truly sad to see that some quarters still defend the inhumane mockery that is child marriage and oppose any clear-cut legislation to prohibit it on the grounds that in doing so they are somehow defending the teachings of Islam! Are we to believe that our great religion would endorse marrying off a ten-year-old girl to someone in his eighties just for the financial benefit of her male guardian?! Would those same people who object to legislation outlawing what is a despicable form of marriage allow their own daughters to enter into such a union? The answer is, of course, no. Would they deny that a law exists banning Saudi nationals from marrying foreign women, with exceptions only granted on special authorization? The answer, again, is no, a thousand times over. Do these people mean to persuade us, then, that Islam is stopping the government protecting children from parents who wish to toy with their destinies? The answer? I don't know! We all recognize that child marriage amounts to nothing more than the open sale of children, so why waste time debating whether to set the age of a girl's first menstruation and puberty at nine or ten?! We all know that the vast majority of Saudi families do not endorse child marriage, so why the prevarication over a ruling that would put a stop to an aberrant minority from sullying the image of Islam and Muslims? Why do we persist in allowing such a small minority to depict the Saudi male as a merciless sadist and child predator? Tackling the issue case by repellent case will reap no rewards. What it requires is a law to ban outright the marriage of underage girls, bearing in mind that the Kingdom is a signatory nation to an international convention on the rights of the child, while the Ministry of Health has warned time and again until it's blue in the face of the health risks involved in marrying young girls. So, what's the way forward? For us to carry on playing hide and seek with international organizations that demand we protect our children, or for our religious scholars and experts to get together and produce a law that puts an end to the practice? The claim that child marriage is the result of long-established Arab customs is patently untrue. The Arab in days of yore would never “sell” his daughter. Instead, the practice only became known after the discovery of oil and the subsequent insatiable voracity for material wealth.
