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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]
It's more than just "cultural" in those places, although the extreme poverty in such areas do impact heavily on the rate of child marriage - poor parents with too many mouths to feed try to marry their young daughters off so they don't have to provide for them anymore, and also to receive the bride price.  When they try to pass laws banning child marriage, the religious authorities say no way, because it goes against Islam.  A few years ago, when Yemen tried to set a marriage age, protestors (including tons of women) took to the streets to say such a law would be against Islam.

Child marriage centures ago in Europe do NOT have the same impact today as Muhammad's marriage to Aisha.  Muhammad instructed Muslims to follow his Sunnah and do the same things that he did during his life time.  Thus, banning child marriage really is going against Islam, it's going against the Sunnah. [/quote]

Most of what you outline in your first paragraph is cultural or traditional. Moreover, the motivations are not religious in nature.

When Islam spread, localized versions that incorporated local customs tended to develop. Another controversial example is female genital mutilation which is common is some Muslim communities, but uncommon among the vast majority. Child marriage is similar.  If child marriage was as central to Islam as you claim, it would be common in all Muslim countries. But, it is not.

Moreover, why do you focus on Muhammad's marriage to Aisha and not his marriage to Khadija, an important businesswoman who was 15 years older than him? When she died, they had been married for 25 years. One could easily say that Khadija is a model of an independent self-reliant successful woman who contradicts many of the stereotypes of Muslim women.
[/quote]
You're splitting hairs. The reason child marriage is uncommon is that most people, Muslim or not, don't want to marry children.  However, for the twisted few who do, it is important that laws are in place preventing that from happening.  And in some Muslim-majority countries, such as Saudi Arabia, all attempts to set a minimum age for marriage were curbed by the finger-waiving clerics supported by the government whose argument isn't that it's our culture, but that it's our Sunnah, and no one gets to ban what is Sunnah.   So if you happened to be a ten-year old in KSA and there's a man who wants to marry you, and your father agrees, than you're plain SOL.[/quote]

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