A comment-less chronology of “our spiritual values”
Wednesday,
January 22, 2014
BURAK BEKDİL
2009: Huseyin Uzmez, a columnist for the Islamist
daily Vakit, was convicted and imprisoned on charges of
having sex with a 14-year-old girl, but was released from
prison after a court suspended his 13-year sentence. After
his release, Mr. Uzmez defended the Islamic rules that he
said permit girls to wed under the legal age of 16.
Justifying sex with a 14-year-old girl, the 78-year-old Mr.
Uzmez said, “A girl who has reached puberty, who is having
periods, is of age according to our (religious) belief.”
Saudi courts declined to nullify a marriage between a
6-year-old girl and a 58-year-old man. Later, Saudi Arabia’s
Grand Mufti, Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al al-Sheik, insisted that
girls are ready for marriage by age 10 or 12. “Good
upbringing,” the mufti reasoned, “makes a girl ready to
perform all marital duties.”
2010: Turkey was shaken by the surfacing of alleged
serial rapes in Siirt, including cases of adults raping
minors and minors raping toddlers, and killing one. The
mayor of the same town said: “This is a small town and
almost everyone is related to everyone. We've closed the
case after consultations with the governor, the police and
the prosecutor.” And a cabinet minister criticized the media
for reporting rapes “that had occurred a year ago.”
A few days later, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
wife, Emine Erdogan, a local from Siirt, told an audience of
dignitaries in Brussels: “In our culture and civilization,
which has a great historical background, family and
motherhood are sacred.”
Pew research found that 16 percent of Turks think death by
stoning should be the appropriate sentence for adultery.
2011: The government-controlled broadcast watchdog
RTUK fined a TV channel for “pairing a 15-year-old girl with
a 45 year-old man in a matchmaking show.” RTUK said that the
show had broadcast an example of child abuse by fixing a
marriage between an underage girl and an adult. The watchdog
also noted that the show had violated the regulation that
states “broadcasts must not be against society's national
and spiritual values and the Turkish family structure.”
2013: Researchers from Gaziantep University found
that almost 40 percent of marriages in Turkey are child
marriages. The literacy rate of child brides is just 18
percent. A Turkish scholar pointed out that Interior
Ministry figures pinpoint the number of girls under 18 who
married over the past three years at 134,629, while in 2012
only 20,000 families applied to the courts for permission
for their under-16 year old daughters to get married.
2014: Kader Erten, a girl who was forced to marry at
the age of 12, gave birth to two children, was found dead of
gunshot wounds in unclear circumstances. Aysenur Islam,
recently-appointed minister for family and social policy,
said, upon Kader’s death, that the legal age for marriage in
Turkey was 18. Marriage involving a minor below the age of
15 constituted sexual crime and child abuse. However, she
explained, most underage marriages were
“innocently-motivated” since “a mother who had married at
young age thought her daughter, too, could marry at young
age.”
The First Lady: President Abdullah Gul’s official web
page describes the First Lady as: “[Madame] Hayrunisa Gul
believes that women have an important role in shaping the
family, and thus, society; and she supports activities
carried out to strengthen women and family. According to the
web page, Madame Gul married President Gul in 1980.
Wikipedia: According to Wikipedia, “As First Lady of
Turkey Madame Gul has initiated many social reforms through
projects aimed at addressing issues such as education,
health and women's rights. On October 7, 2010, Madame Gul
became the first First Lady to address the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe on issues faced by
children and women.”
Also according to Wikipedia, she married President Gul on
Aug. 20, 1980, “when she was 15 and he was 30.”
RTUK was right. Pairing a 15-year-old girl with an elderly
man in a marriage show on TV is really against the Turkish
society's national and spiritual values and the Turkish
family structure.
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