An extraordinary story that originated on the AP wire, which reports that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who is the country's most senior cleric, has been shocked by the recent court case in which an eight-year-old girl tried to apply for a divorce. It seems to him dangerous creeping liberalism.
"We hear a lot about the marriage of underage girls in the media, and we should know that Islamic law has not brought injustice to women," said the Mufti, Sheik Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, when asked a question after one of his Monday lecture.
"A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she's too young are wrong and are being unfair to her. Our mothers and before them, our grandmothers, married when they were barely 12," he said.
Incidentally, the eight-year-old girl was not granted her divorce: the court in Ozeira, in the interior of the country, decided that her mother had no right to bring the case on her behalf, and that the matter would have to wait until she reached puberty. This decision has been condemned by the government's own human rights commission.
Still, the story does something to explain why Cosmopolitan has never taken off in Saudi: the women in its target age range are all grannies.
