This was not a license for forced marriage. Well-known Hadiths explained that any woman who had reached puberty must give her consent for marriage, though if she was a virgin who remained silent the Prophet explained that ‘her silence is her consent.’ This applied to girls who had reached maturity, which occurred when they began menstruating or reached fifteen years old, whichever came first (Maliki scholars alone allowed that eighteen was the oldest possible age by which puberty occurs). All four Sunni schools, however, permitted a father to contract a marriage for his underage virgin
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