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Early and delayed marriages continue to undermine Arab women’s rights
23-11-2017
AL Hayat last Monday drew attention to the present duality between early marriage and delayed marriage in many Arab countries, describing it as a hitch that needs radical and prompt solution and pointing to the economic factor largely involved in this matter. Al Hayat spoke to sociology professor at Mutah University in Jordan, Hussein Mahadeen, who attributed early marriage mainly to the personal status low that gives sharia judges discretionary power to allow child marriages (under 18 years). The delay in marriages, on the other hand, is due to the transformation of society from traditional rural values to modernization and technology culture associated with a hike in wedding expenses, Mahadeen explained. And while the Tunisian social psychology expert, Rania Khudr, described as ‘catastrophic’ the delay in marriage for both sexes, blaming it largely on the deteriorating economic conditions, the human rights activist, Fatmeh Ghareebi, confirmed that the marriage of minors has always been a norm practiced by families in the marginalized rural areas of Tunisia and resulting mainly from the phenomenon of early school dropout. For his part, the Yemeni researcher, Saeed Abdel Ghafour, clarified that the worsening economic and security situation could exacerbate child marriage and increase the number of widows and ‘spinsters’, as he put it, and maybe, divorce incidents as well. Al Hayat recalled Egyptian President, Abdel Fatah al Sisi’s shock over the number of 12-year old widows and divorcees. In parallel, the newspaper reported a significant decline in early marriages in Palestine, mentioning a raise in the average age of the first marriage among males compared to the 1997 rate, posting an average of 24.6 years in 2011 against 23 years in 1997 for males and an average of 20.1 years in 2012 against 18 years in 1997 for females. (More on the feature on the following link: https://goo.gl/DsH644, https://goo.gl/2v6ufd, https://goo.gl/6NZf2e, https://goo.gl/uqVuyc , https://goo.gl/6sDbXG ) . (Al Hayat, November 20, 2017)
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