The code went on to outlaw underage marriage. Girls were forbidden to marry until they were eighteen, men till they were twenty-two. Then there was the bride price: in Afghanistan men who wanted to marry a girl customarily paid that girl’s family a sum of money negotiated by the men of the two families. Afghan modernists felt this amounted to fathers selling their daughters for profit. Amanullah’s code did not forbid the bride price but set an upper limit on it of twenty-nine rupees. Brides had been going for 10,000 rupees.1
