What is it about?
Child marriage in Pakistan is often described as a clash between Islamic law and modern human rights. This paper challenges that simple picture. It argues that the real debate is about power — specifically, who gets to decide what classical Islamic legal concepts actually mean and how they should be translated into modern law. By looking carefully at traditional Islamic jurisprudence, colonial legal history, and contemporary Pakistani legislation, the paper shows that those who invoke Islamic law to justify child marriage often leave out important protections that classical scholars originally built into the same legal framework, such as the right of a girl to dissolve her marriage upon reaching adulthood. In other words, the debate is not simply religion versus human rights — it is a struggle over whose interpretation of religion counts, and why.
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Why is it important?
This paper is important because it moves beyond the familiar but unhelpful framing of child marriage as a simple conflict between religion and modernity. What makes it unique is its detailed engagement with classical Islamic jurisprudence, showing that historical Hanafi legal scholars included meaningful protections for girls that are being selectively ignored in contemporary Pakistani debates. This selective reading of Islamic law is rarely examined closely, and this paper fills that gap. The work is also timely. Pakistan continues to struggle with legislative reform on child marriage, with major differences between provinces and ongoing debates in the Council of Islamic Ideology. By integrating legal history, religious scholarship, demographic data, and policy analysis, this paper offers a richer and more accurate understanding of where Pakistani law stands and where it could go. It also opens three important areas for future research: the internal diversity within Hanafi jurisprudence, the actual workings of Pakistani family courts, and how Islamic legal reasoning around public interest and general welfare is being used — or not used — in legislative and judicial settings. Researchers, policymakers, legal practitioners, and human rights advocates working on child protection, Islamic law, and South Asian governance will all find this paper relevant and useful.
Perspectives
I began this research frustrated by how often the debate around child marriage in Pakistan gets reduced to a confrontation between Islam and human rights, as if these two frameworks are naturally and permanently opposed. The more I read — in classical Hanafi jurisprudence, in colonial legal history, in contemporary Pakistani legislation — the clearer it became that this framing is not only inaccurate but also counterproductive. It allows those who wish to resist reform to claim the full weight of Islamic tradition behind them, while quietly setting aside the very protections that tradition originally contained. What I hope readers take from this paper is that Islamic law is not a fixed, monolithic system handed down unchanged through the centuries. It is a rich, diverse, and debated tradition, one that has always involved disagreement, reinterpretation, and adaptation. The question of child marriage in Pakistan is ultimately a question about who has the authority to interpret that tradition today — and whose interpretations get heard in courtrooms, legislatures, and public debate. I hope this paper contributes, in however small a way, to making those interpretations more honest, more complete, and more protective of the children whose lives depend on them.
Dr. Jamil Akhtar
University of the Punjab
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Puberty, Guardianship and Consent: Classical Fiqh in Contemporary Pakistani Debates on Child Marriage, Religion Compass, July 2026, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/rec3.70069.
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