Hoko Horii (Leiden University): Is Child Marriage an Islamic Practice?

About the speaker
Hoko Horii works at the VanVollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Society (VVI). Her expertise lies in the field of socio-legal studies, legal philosophy, human rights law, and children’s rights. How does law stipulate ‘rights’, and for whom are they just and fair and for whom are they not just and fair? How does law reflect, influence, reinforce, and control our sense of ‘righteousness’? She addresses these questions with concrete case studies over different projects. Her monograph, ‘Child Marriage, Rights and Choice’, examined the concept of agency in international human rights, through a detailed socio-legal examination of child marriage in Indonesia and international discourse on child marriage. Her current research project focuses on the legal practice of ‘age of consent’ laws. https://hokohorii.com/

About the topic
It is said child marriage is widespread among the Muslim population. On one hand, some conservative Islamic scholars and politicians argue that Islamic law permits child marriage, and setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 is ‘un-Islamic’ because it goes against the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, who married Aishah when she was six years old. On the other hand, however, some Islamic clerics have issued a fatwa against child marriage, deeming the practice ‘harmful’ and supporting raising a higher minimum age of marriage. Is child marriage really an Islamic practice? To answer this question, Hoko Horii in this talk will look into the child marriage practice in Indonesia - a majority Muslim country that has one of the highest numbers of child brides in the world. Her research included an analysis of the Indonesian marriageable age legislation and the recent petitions to the Constitutional Court to raise the marriageable age, fieldwork in a Muslim-majority village within West Java and the island of Bali with a Hindu population.