If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

Having heard their arguments against the practice, he had gone back to the sources, and had found an eighth-century judge and jurist, Ibn Shubruma, with a sound fatwa against the practice of child marriage. Ibn Shubruma argued that the issue hinged on a woman’s autonomy. When girls reached puberty, they could choose whom to marry. By being married in childhood, this choice was taken away from them. Akram added to this argument, stating that the oppression and injustice occurring within child marriages today emphasises the need to oppose it at the juristic level. The classical legal argument, bolstered by the modern examples of injustice that Arzoo and Mehrun had brought to his attention, changed his mind: “I’ve learned from these girls,” he said. The mostly male crowd was stunned. For a sheikh to declare that he was changing his mind was unusual enough, but for him to do so after debating with two women students?