Saudi girl sold as chattel to 80 year old man

Arab News:

When Rasha registered for high school a few years ago, she discovered that her estranged father had married her off without her knowledge to a man in his 80s in exchange for a SR30,000 (about $8,000) dowry payment. Now a court has denied her appeals to divorce the man.

“The officials at the girls education department discovered that my file had no birth certificate except a temporary one from the hospital where I was born,” Rasha told Al-Riyadh daily in a report published yesterday.

“They asked me to bring my father’s identity card or a printout from the Civil Affairs Directorate. After searching through my papers, they gave me the shock of my life when they told me that my father had married me to an 85-year-old man when I was just 10 years old, and that I am his fourth wife.”

Now the 18-year-old resident of Taif is appealing to the government and the National Society for Human Rights to intervene after a local judge declined to grant the divorce, even after a donor agreed to reimburse the dowry money that the old man was demanding to terminate the marriage.

Rasha’s father and mother split up before she was born, and her grandmother raised her. She says she has never met her father or the man that she was married to without her knowledge.

Islam forbids forced marriages. Though fathers must grant permission for daughters to marry, they cannot force their daughters to marry somebody of their choice. Furthermore, dowry is supposed to be paid to and left under the control of the woman getting married.

Nevertheless, in Rasha’s case the old man demanded a reimbursement of the dowry. Furthermore, the girl learned that her geriatric husband has been collecting social insurance payments since she was 10 after she was placed on his family ID card.

...

Some father. The Saudi courts are handling this all wrong. They should annul the marriage and bring charges against the father and the "husband." The case goes to show that even when Shari's law forbids something justice is still hard to come by, especially for women.