The Times Discovers Nojoud Ali, Yemen's 8- (or 10)-Year Old Divorcée

Two and a half months ago I wrote here about about Nojoud, the 8-year-old Yemeni girl married off to a much older man who sustained months of sexual abuse but managed, with the intercession of an anonymous donor from the United Arab Emirates, to buy back her freedom through divorce. It's gratifying to report that The Times just discovered her and tells her story in tomorrow's editions.

The Time story is more comprehensive, retelling the ordeal of another girl (this one just 9 years old) who escaped her conjugal home to go to a hospital and complain about her treatment, the same month that Nojoud had come forward. "Together," The Times' Robert Worth writes from Yemen, "the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too."

It's a disheartening account, as accounts of child marriage in countries of the Middle East and South Asia tend to be. In Muslim societies, the so-called conservative patriarchies rub their chins and justify child rape by relying on that old (and somewhat inaccurate) stand-by--the Prophet Muhammad's marriage to his beloved Aisha, who was 9 years old at the time of her marriage to the Prophet. This is the marriage that caused a preacher in my backyard, the kerosene-breathing Jerry Vine, to accuse Muhammad, in a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in 2002, of being a "demon-possessed pedophile." That's what happens when pre-Medieval history is interpreted through the simplistic-reductive prism of sex-obsessed reactionaries like, say, Nancy Grace. The historically vetted evidence wouldn't make it into a grand jury report. As Karen Armstrong wrote of Prophet Muhammad's marriage to Aisha in Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (HaperCollins, 1993),

... she was still only nine years old, so there was no wedding feast and the ceremonial was kept to a minimum. Indeed, it was so low-key that on the day itself Aisha had no idea that she was going to be married and was playing with her friends on a see-saw. [...] Then they took her to her little apartment beside the mosque. There Muhammad was waiting for her, and he laughed and smiled while they decked her with jewellery and ornaments and combed her long hair. Eventually a bowl of milk was brought in and Muhammad and Aisha both drank from it. The marriage made little difference to Aisha's life. Tabari [Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, the prominent Koranic historian] says that she was so young that she stayed in her parents' home and the marriage was consummated there later when she had reached puberty. Aisha went on playing with her girlfriends and her dolls. Sometimes Muhammad used to come to see her, and, Aisha says, the little girls would "steal out of the house and he would go after them and bring them back, for her was pleased for my sake to have them there." Muhammad had enjoyed playing with his own daughters when they were small and he sometimes joined Aisha's games.

Of course it's always more convenient, for the bigots of the West and the misogynists of the East, to take a more literalist approach to history and apply today's assumptions to yesterday's nuances.

There was, to be sure, nothing nuanced about Noujoud's first night, graphically reported in the Times story the way the Yemen Times, from where I got the story in April, only alluded to: "The trouble started on the first night, when her 30-year-old husband, Faez Ali Thamer, took off her clothes as soon as the light was out. She ran crying from the room, but he caught her, brought her back and forced himself on her. Later, he beat her as well. “I hated life with him,” she said, staring at the ground in front of her. The wedding came so quickly that no one bothered to tell her how women become pregnant, or what a wife’s role is, she added."

The New York Times also notes that a 1992 Yemeni law "set the minimum legal age of marriage at 15. But in 1998 Parliament revised it, allowing girls to be married earlier as long as they did not move in with their husbands until they reached sexual maturity." Not to excuse it, but that law was obviously modeled after the more realistic and likely more historically accurate version of Aisha's marriage. Obviously, the law isn't always followed. Who would have thought that Marxist ideology, which once dominated parts of Yemen and did away with child-marriage laws, would be more enviable than the conservative, Islamist-minded laws that have swept over the land since Marxism's withering and Yemen's reunification in 1990.

That's the unspoken underside of the end of communist influence in the Middle East all the way to Afghanistan and beyond: Lenin's materialism gave way to Islamism's hyper fundamentalism, whether in the shape of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Sadrism in Iraq. (In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, or what I call Taliban Lite, has been dominant all along.)