The Islamic Ruling on ‘Sexual Enjoyment of Young Girls’
On December 18, 2016, a mother took her two daughters Christmas shopping at the DFO outlet centre in Homebush, in western Sydney. She left the younger girl, three years old, and her seven-year-old sister at the centre’s playground while she went to buy presents. At about half past one in the afternoon, the three-year-old wandered away from the play area. A security guard on duty received a report of a lost child. The CCTV footage entered into evidence at his subsequent trial showed him approaching the playground, kneeling down to speak to the girl, taking her by the hand, and leading her into a stairwell of the centre that was outside the surveillance camera coverage. They were in the stairwell for eleven minutes. He brought her back to the play area, where her older sister was crying because she could not find her younger sibling, and where the mother had also returned. The security guard berated the mother, in front of the children, about the dangers of leaving young children unattended in a busy shopping centre.
The security guard’s name was Mohammad Hassan Al Bayati. He was thirty years old. He had arrived in Australia by boat as an Iraqi refugee, granted protection on the standard humanitarian grounds. At his trial in the New South Wales District Court in 2019, he was convicted of taking and detaining a person with intent to obtain an advantage, of committing an act of indecency with a victim under ten years old, and of indecent assault of a person under sixteen.¹
There is nothing exceptional about this story in the inventory of what occurs in Western cities every week. A predator targeted a child, but when this story appeared on my feed today, I was reminded of the foundations Islam has established not only to increase the number of such cases, but to sanctify the act itself.
By the Book
The Doha-based Islamic portal IslamWeb, used as a primary reference by Arabic-speaking Muslims worldwide since 1998, maintains in its public archive Fatwa Number 296044, dated 24 Rajab 1436 of the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to May 12, 2015. Its title is Dawabit al-Istimta’ bi al-Saghirah: “Rules and Limits Governing Sexual Enjoyment of the Young Girl.”²
The questioner cites a passage from Bada’i al-Fawa’id, the multi-volume work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350), the closest student and intellectual heir of Ibn Taymiyya and one of the four most-cited Islamic jurists. The passage reproduced verbatim in the question reads:
