ABSTRACT
Orthodox Islamic law imposes no age qualification whatever for marriage, and there is thus no bar to the marriage of minors. The fixing of a minimum age of marriage was prompted by abuse, for economic reasons, of the legal permission to marry off minors without limitation of age. More than 200 marriage confirmations issued by the Shari'a Court of Jaffa up to the beginning of 1970 included 30 clear cases of marriages of girls under 17. Commissions consisting of regional qadis and representatives of the Muslim Division of the Ministry of Religious Affairs inspected the records of the madhuns from time to time to try to discover to what extent religious and secular law was being complied with. Some couples asserted in court in 1960 and 1961 that they had been married "for about ten years", but it is impossible to tell from this finding whether they were married before or after the enactment of the Age of Marriage Law.
