Girls as Chattel in Islam

"Four people died. People are angry. They might react."
"If we give her back to them [her conservative Muslim family], we are destroying what we did."
"They should be arrested for what they did to her."
Hussaina Aliyu Ibrahim, human rights lawyer, Lagos, Nigeria

A High Court in Gezawa, Nigeria heard lawyer Ibrahim's plea to drop a murder case against a 14-year-old girl who had been forced at age 13 to marry a 35-year-old farmer as his second wife, and who was accused of poisoning him and three of his friends. The Gezawa judge ruled that the girl, Wasila Tasi'u, be released from prison in juvenile detention. The sentence, proclaimed the justice, is illegal given the girl's minority-age status.

Another factor in the case was that a 7-year-old girl who lived in the same house, a younger sister to the farmer's first wife, was permitted to testify in court that the then-13-year-old had given her money to go out and buy rat poison. As it happens, yet another 13-year-old girl who similarly killed her 35-year-old husband is on death row; this, despite a year-old ruling that the sentence is illegal.

14-year old Wasila Tasiu (L) speaks with an unidentified defence counsel outside the courtroom during a 30-minute break during her first day of trial at Kano state High Court in the village of Gezawa outside Kano, Nigeria ©Aminu Abubakar (AFP/File)

Wassila Tasi'u's case was taken up by human rights activists. They had been in court on Tuesday and when the judge announced that the state was dropping the case against the girl there were loud cheers. In contrast to the anger coming from relatives of the farmer and his three friends who died. Hussaina Aliyu Ibrahim has spent 27 years championing the human rights of girls.

Her deeply conservative Muslim family insists she should be returned to them, while lawyer Ibrahim recoils at the very thought that this could occur, knowing full well that the family would turn Tasi'u over to yet another forced marriage. The parents of the girl hardly bothered visiting her during her year in jail when at age 13 she was placed in juvenile detention.

The Muslim north of Nigeria practices polygamy and child marriage. Neither Tasi'u or the other 13-year-ld girl were ever exposed to any level of formal education. They are incapable of reading or writing; both obviously groomed as future 'wives' for older men. Tasi'u speaks only her native Hausa, but she was made to sign [with a thumbprint] a 'confession' written in English.

Lawyer Ibrahim advises that her Kano chapter of the International Federation of Women's Lawyers has made contact with a family that has offered to care for Tasi'u. Her immediate need is to be protected from some kind of retaliation on the part of those offended by her release. Those who may be prepared to take her life to placate families enraged that whoever murdered their family member is now free.

Sani Garba, 55, holds a picture of his then 14-year-old daughter-in-law Wasila Tasi'u inside her abandoned matrimonial home in the village of Unguwar Yansoro on August 10, 2014 (AFP Photo/Aminu Abubakar)