Does Islam, in fact, Encourage Paedophilia?

The question is, 'Does Islam provide a safe-haven for paedophiles?' This is a charge which a lot of non-Muslims, especially fundamentalist Christians and Islamophobes, often pose.

Muslims usually just resort to emotional outburts and blanket denials and anger but instead of getting emotional we should first of all try to look at what is the definition of paedophilia and what the Islamic Shariah says about the age of marriage and take it from there. The word paedophile is from two Greek words meaning 'child love'. The modern generally accepted meaning has come to mean, 'A person who has sex with or is sexually attracted to people who are under the legal age of consent'. The problem with this is that the legal age of consent varies from country to country: in the UK it is 16, in Holland it is 12. A better definition therefore, and one which is scientifically and medically more correct, is 'someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children'.

With that definition it is clear that Shariah does not permit any kind of sexual relation with a prepubescent (well at least the Sunnis don't and I am speaking as a Sunni) child. HOWEVER, the problem is that almost all countries of the world define paedophilia not in a medical sense but as sex with someone below the legal age of consent which is usually around 15 or 16. In countries where it is less, eg Holland, it is clearly stated that only people of a similar age can have sex with a 12 year old. The aim of that is to stop paedophiles from preying on vulnerable youngsters. Incidentally, in Iran the age of consent is 9. In Pakistan it is legally 16 but many marriages take place with people younger than that. The age of marriage in almost all countries is 16 plus and is different from the age of consent bcause it is generally considered that even though someone may be biologically ready for sex they are not mentally ready.

Now let us come to Shariah. Now, I think none of us can honestly deny that in Islamic Shariah, as traditionally understood by all four Sunni schools and the Shia school as well, the traditional age of consent for marriage has been set at the onset of puberty since puberty is considered the onset of adulthood and can be at any age from upwards. The reason for this is that the Beloved Prophet married Sayyida Aisha when she was 9. Indeed, most of the sources claim that the nikah took place when she was 6 and that it was consummated when Bibi Aisha was 9. This is the whole basis of the non-Muslims attacks on Islam allowing paedophilia. Muslims can either be honest and admit that this is what all our fiqh books say or they can claim that the traditional reports are wrong (which some modernists have tried to do but not very convincingly as Shaykh Haddad has shown.)

The other point is that, following the Prophet's example, many of the early Muslims married young girls too eg. Sayyidina Umar married the daughter of Hazrat Ali called Umm e Kulthum when she was of a similar age to Bibi Aisha. That is why in British India, when the British tried to make a law to change the age at which girls could be married off -- since child marriage was prevalent in Indian society amongst all communities, Muslim and Hindu,--no less a luminary of the Ahlus Sunnah than Pir Sayyid Jama'at Ali Shah Sahib criticised the British Govt.s plans and threatened to order all of his mureeds to marry off their daughters since he felt it was unfair interference in Muslim personal life. The Brit government backed down. (Source: Seerat e Amir e Millat). Of course, Islam is not alone in this. Most Christian scholars believe Mary was around 12 when she gave birth to Jesus and Romeo and Juliet were also of a similar age as was Beatrice when Dante fell in love with her.

Therefore we are left with a problem that, I at least, as a traditionalist Muslim cannot answer. If we judge the actions of the Salaf (the first three generations after the Prophet) and the Prophet sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam by modern standards of what constitutes paedophilia than we risk losing our imaan (nauzubillah) and if we defend the practise then we cannot claim that Islam does not encourage paedophilia.

There may, however, be a solution. If we challenge the modern de facto definition of paedophilia and insist on the medical definition of sex with PRE-pubescents' becoming de jure. This will also have other benefits such as stopping the technical criminilisation of millions of young teenagers throughout the world who are discovering sex for the first time but are, technically, breaking the law. Sexual attraction to pubescent teens is another thing altogether tp paedophilia and has existed throughout history in most cultures and the term for that is ephebophilia. This is from the ancient Greek word ephebe (which we still use in English and which means a teenage youth who has reached puberty; in the homosexual community a word which is practically synonomous with the classical term ephebe is twink.)

As others have written on Chowk in the past, the sexual attraction to postpubescent teens was considered the norm in Ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, India, China, the whole of the Islamic World, medieval Europe, indeed in every human culture until the twentieth century where the age of sixteen or eighteen was arbitrarily chosen as the age of consent.

I believe such a common sense approach would be much more sensible than the one we currently have with every country defining its own age of consent; instead let us have a universal age of consent defined at the UN.