Puberty, Guardianship and Consent: Classical Fiqh in Contemporary Pakistani Debates on Child Marriage

ABSTRACT

Child marriage in Pakistan is routinely framed as a collision between immutable ‘classical Islamic law’ and ‘modern human rights’. This review article challenges that binary by advancing a precise argument: the operative dispute is a contest over interpretive authority —who holds the institutional and discursive power to translate premodern Sunnī juristic concepts— bulūgh (puberty), wilāyat al‐nikāḥ (marital guardianship) and khiyār al‐bulūgh (the option to repudiate upon maturity)—into the statutory language of a postcolonial state. Synthesizing scholarship on classical Ḥanafī fiqh, colonial legal transformation and contemporary Pakistani legislation, the article demonstrates that invocations of ‘the Ḥanafī position’ in current Pakistani debates are highly selective, systematically decoupling guardian authority from the classical safeguards—harm ( ḍarar ), suitability ( kafāʾa ) and repudiation ( khiyār )—that originally balanced it. The article integrates Pakistan‐specific evidence: the Council of Islamic Ideology's recommendations, provincial reforms in Sindh (2013), Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the government's Child Marriage in Islam (2020) document, UNFPA demographic data and recent scholarship on sacred justifications. It identifies three understudied areas for future research: the internal plurality of Ḥanafī jurisprudence on guardianship and harm, the empirical sociology of Pakistani family courts, and the institutional uptake of maqāṣid/maṣlaḥa reasoning in legislative and judicial forums. The article concludes that child marriage is a critical observatory for how Islamic legal authority is being unmade and remade in the modern Muslim nation‐state.