It began, as most reckonings do, not with a revolution but with a rulebook. A bill, tabled without warning, passed without fanfare, and signed under siege — the Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2025. A small piece of paper that rewrote the age at which a girl could be a bride. Or rather, the age below which she could not.
Yet, in Pakistan, the age of consent has never been just about age. It is about who is allowed to speak for God and who is not.
When Sharmila Faruqi rose in the National Assembly to suspend the rules, what followed was an act of legislative bravery almost unmatched in recent memory. Her bill sought to end child marriage — that is, marriage under 18 — and to bring Pakistan closer to its stated obligations under international human rights law. It promised to punish adult men who married children. It criminalised nikahs without CNICs. It forbade cohabitation resulting from such marriages, branding it for what it is: abuse.
It was, by every measure, a humane law. And so, inevitably, it became a dangerous one.
Because in Pakistan, every child bride is a battlefield — not just of law, but of legacy. Within days, the clerics arrived. The Council of Islamic Ideology called the law un-Islamic. The maulanas warned of Western conspiracies. That old bogey — the death of the family system — was wheeled out once again as though it were the girl’s dignity, not her dowry, that the nation had been protecting for seventy-five years.
One member of the CII declared that Parliament could not stand above the Quran and Sunnah. Perhaps. But neither could the girl beneath the weight of both.
The charge was led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a man whose politics rarely spare the pulpit. “It makes fornication easier and marriage harder,” he thundered, as though consent was the vice and coercion the virtue. In his mind, the bill did not delay marriage — it delayed Islam.
It didn’t matter that the Federal Shariat Court had already ruled in 2022 that the state could set a minimum marriage age. It didn’t matter that nearly every Muslim country of note — including Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and Tunisia — had long done so. What mattered was not what the law said but who was allowed to write it.
And yet, write it they did.
Against the din of fatwas and firebrands, the bill cleared both houses of Parliament. On May 30, 2025, President Asif Ali Zardari — no stranger to playing godfather and gambler — put pen to paper. A rare act of spine in a landscape of spineless drift. “This law is not just a law,” said Sherry Rehman. “It is a commitment.” And for once, perhaps, that was true.
But in Pakistan, signatures do not seal fate. They provoke it.
Within days, the law was dragged to the Federal Shariat Court — the last refuge of clerical veto. The petitioner was not a scholar, nor a mother, nor a victim. He was a citizen with a lawyer, asking the court to strike down the Act as “repugnant to Shariah.” They argued that the age of 18 was a Western invention. In Islam, it was not the number but the nature, not age, but puberty, that marked readiness for marriage.
The state, they said, had defied divine law.
But divine law in Pakistan is always curiously man-made. It is rarely recited in the voice of a girl pulled from school at 13 or stitched into wedding clothes at 14. Her silence is treated as consent. Her endurance is rebranded as maturity.
Now, the court must decide between the hadith and the child. Between a law crafted for protection and a jurisprudence preserved for power.
What does it mean that it took until 2025 to criminalise child marriage in the capital of a nuclear state? What does it mean that such criminalisation may still be reversed?
It means this country has yet to decide who it belongs to — the living or the lived-in. It means the girl child remains a disputed territory — her body, a site of lawfare; her future, collateral to culture. And it means that progress here never comes as policy. It comes as a provocation.
But for now, at least in Islamabad, the law has been written.
Now, the courts will write their fate.
There is irony in how the clerics invoke tradition while the victims of those traditions cannot speak. There is cruelty in quoting the Prophet’s mercy while denying mercy to those most in need of it. There is a deeper injustice in arguing maturity with those who’ve never had to survive it. When Maulana Fazl stood in the National Assembly and decried this bill as an assault on Islam, it was not Islam he was protecting — it was patriarchy. And when rallies were announced in Hazara to resist the law, they were not rallies of faith. They were rallies of fear.
The fear is that if the state can protect girls from child marriage, it might one day protect them from other contracts of compulsion: forced conversions, honour killings, and even discriminatory inheritance. That if a girl can say no at 17, she might also say no at 27 — to a husband, to a maulana, to a life decided for her.
So they resist. And call it divine.
But somewhere, between the soft pages of this new Act, lies the faint echo of another Pakistan — one where the state does not fear its daughters.
One where the age of consent is not a battlefield.
But a beginning.
References
Clerics warn president against signing child marriage bill. Dawn. https://www.dawn.com/news/1913987
Child marriage law challenged in Federal Shariat Court. Dawn. https://www.dawn.com/news/amp/1915367
National Assembly passes landmark bill to criminalise child marriages in Islamabad. Dawn. https://www.dawn.com/news/1911451
Pakistan Council of Islamic Ideology declares bill to criminalize child marriages ‘un-Islamic’. Arab News. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2602444/pakistan
UN Women Asia and the Pacific. (2025, May). Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2025.
