Sally’s Story: A Child Bride in Yemen

By Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand
Sanaa

Al Jazeera
September 5, 2010
http://english.aljazeera.net/photo_galleries/africa/2010831920332122.html

Sally as-Sabahi used to love playing the make-believe marriage game with her brothers and sisters.

For a little girl living in a single room down a back alley of Old Sanaa, just imagining the new wedding clothes, make-up and party for her school friends was a thrilling way to escape daily grind of poverty.

So when her mother showed her the real-life snow white dress and sparkling jewellery she promised would be hers, ten-year-old Sally had no trouble agreeing to marry the man her parents had chosen: Nabil, her 25-year-old first cousin, for whom Sally would be a second marriage.

Beaten, drugged and raped, Sally won a divorce from Nabil recently after her story made headlines in local media and became focus for a national debate that has polarised Yemeni society.

As the West frets over how to stabilise the country that produced the failed Al Qaeda Christmas Day airline bomber, a law to set a minimum age for marriage has become a rallying cry for the religious fundamentalists on whose support the Western-backed president relies.

“I don’t call it marriage, I call it rape,” said Shada Nasser, a lawyer who has worked on several child marriage cases.

Nojoud Ali al-Ahdal, who was herself raped and beaten aged nine by her 30-year-old husband, was the first of only three Yemeni child brides to win divorce.

The practice of child marriages affects millions of young lives in Yemen.

The International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) found just under half of all girls in Yemen are married before they are 18, classified as underage by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Yemen is a signatory.

With no legal minimum age for marriage, a study by Sanaa University found that in some of Yemen’s regions half of all girls are married before the age of 15.

“The greatest problem facing Yemeni women today is child marriages,” said Wafa Ali of the Yemeni Women’s Union. “These early marriages rob the girl of the right to a normal childhood and education. The girls are forced to have children before their bodies are fully grown.”

Many girls suffer repeated miscarriages or end up with complications brought on by the trauma of forced sex, said Dr Arwa Elrabee, a leading gynaecologist.

In April a local women’s rights group reported 12-year-old bride Elham Shuee had died three days after marrying a man in his 20s. The girl suffered a rupture of the womb caused by sex, said Majed al-Mathhaji, spokesman for the Sisters Arab Forum.

Last September, another twelve-year-old, Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, bled to death during three days of child birth, her body, doctors said afterward, simply too small to cope.

Sally remembers the first night Nabil forced himself on her.

“At first, I felt safe. I mean I didn't know what was going on, so how could I be scared? He started taking my clothes off. I wanted to leave them on, but he told me to take them off so we could sleep,” said Sally.

“I started bleeding. It hurt. I was crying and shouting and hated myself. Since that I have seen him like death.”

One evening, sick of Sally’s refusal to sleep with Nabil again, her aunt tied her to the bed. Eventually Sally’s parents were called.

At stake was the $1,000 dowry Nabil’s family had paid to Sally’s father. Earning little over $2 a day selling chillies in the market of Old Sanaa, Mabkhout as-Sabahi had spent the money on rent and paying off debts. If Sally refused to live up to her marital obligations Nabil could ask for his money back and Mabkhout couldn’t pay.

Stirring a cup of tea for his daughter Mabkhout slipped a powerful sleeping pill into it and gave the mug to Sally to drink.

“We wanted to prove we were not encouraging Sally to refuse her husband,” said her father.

But the single pill wasn’t strong enough, so a few days later Mabkhout used two.

“He forced me to drink it,” said Sally. “I drank it all. He was hitting me. I was so dizzy.”

Behind her black niqab, the Islamic face dress, tears well up in the eyes of Sally’s mother, Nouria: “I never spoke with my daughters about sex. I felt ashamed. I trusted my sister would care for her like a daughter.”

Before unification in 1990 Yemeni law set the minimum age of marriage at 17. With the victory of north over south that was reduced to 15.

Nine years later, in what some activists see as pay-off to the radical Islamists who helped the president win Yemen’s civil war, amendments to civil status laws abolished a minimum age altogether.

In February last year a majority of MPs voted to re-establish a minimum age of 17, but the bill was immediately rejected by the Islamic Sharia Codification Committee.

With parliament again due to vote on the law in April, hundreds of black-clad fully veiled women took to the streets in protest.

“Parliament is trying to vote a law that is against sharia,” said Zeinab as-Sumaidar, a student of Islamic law from the Iman University, a conservative Islamic school founded by Sheikh Abdel Majid al-Zindani, whom the US lists as a terrorist for his ties to Al Qaeda.

Opponents of minimum age argue the prophet Muhammad married one of his wives, Aisha, when she was nine.

“We don’t want to be forced into Western values,” said Umm Islam. “It is not for people to change divine law. Don’t you think God is more merciful than your UN conventions and your women’s rights groups?”

Sheikh Mohammed al-Hazmi has led opposition to a minimum age and issued a fatwa, or religious decree, signed by 140 of Yemen’s leading religious authorities, warning any Yemeni from supporting the “un-Islamic” attempt to restrict the age of marriage.

“We view a child as an adult when she reaches puberty, not when she is 18 as you do in the West,” he said in an interview in the Rahman Mosque where he preaches.

“In the West you have this freedom slogan. Satellite channels make the young sexually aroused. If they have sex and are not married they commit adultery and this is forbidden in Islam. So we allow them to marry and not to commit a crime.”

With religious conservatives so far succeeding in preventing the minimum age law, thousands more girls like Sally never have the chance to escape a violent world of adults they are too young to understand.

Flash bulbs light up the otherwise gloomy office of the judge.

A plump thumb is dipped into the dark ink and carefully lowered onto the paper next to the curving Arabic letters that spell out her name.

Behind her niqab, Sally’s eyes narrow in a smile as the judge studies the document; two thumb prints next to each other, the last proximity of a marriage that was anything but close.

“I was feeling this morning there was a black cloud hanging over my head,” said Sally, leaving the judge’s office after her historical divorce. “Today I feel so free.”