What the Research on Early and Forced Marriage Among Rohingya Girls Reveals and What Islam Actually Requires
THE INVISIBLE HALF • ARTICLE 3 OF 5
I. A Father Who Thought He Was Protecting Her
She was fourteen. Her father had watched the camp fill with men he did not know, with uncertainty that never resolved, with hunger that came and went unpredictably. He had watched other families suffer. He had watched what happened to girls who had no one to protect them. He had watched his daughter grow up in a place that was neither safe nor permanent, in conditions he had never imagined he would raise a child in.
And so when a proposal came from an older man, some financial arrangement, a promise of security then he said yes. Not because he did not love his daughter. Because he did. He believed he was doing the most protective thing a father could do in circumstances that had stripped him of almost every other option.
She left school the week after the wedding. She was pregnant within the year. By seventeen she had two children, a body worn beyond its years, and no pathway back to the education she had left behind. She had not chosen any of this. Neither, in any meaningful sense, had her father. They had both been caught in a system that left them with no good options and that dressed the least-bad option in Islamic language to make it bearable.
This article is about that system. And about the case from the Islamic history (the genuine, evidence-grounded, prophetically supported case) for dismantling it.
II. What the Research Found
The systematic review of 34 studies on Rohingya women’s experiences (2014–2025) documents early and forced marriage as one of the most consistent and consequential findings across the evidence base. It appears not as an isolated theme but woven through multiple others like education, livelihoods, reproductive health, gender-based violence, and mental health. Understanding early marriage in isolation misses how deeply it connects to every other dimension of Rohingya women’s vulnerability.
Displacement Increased Early Marriage Rates
Multiple studies document that early marriage rates increased in displacement settings compared to pre-displacement norms.1 This is a crucial finding. Early marriage among the Rohingya is not simply a cultural practice carried unchanged from Myanmar into the camps. It is a practice whose frequency rose in response to the specific conditions of displacement such as poverty, insecurity, absence of legal protection, and the collapse of normal economic and social structures.
The drivers identified in the research are specific and structural. Families facing food insecurity and economic devastation saw marriage as reducing the number of dependants they had to feed. Perceived physical insecurity (the fear that an unmarried girl in a crowded camp was a girl at risk) made marriage feel like a form of protection. The absence of educational pathways and economic opportunities for girls removed the alternatives that might have made early marriage less appealing or necessary. And the absence of legal frameworks governing marriage age in displacement settings removed even the minimal protections that formal law might have provided.
The COVID-19 Pandemic Made It Worse
The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the closure of informal learning centres across the camps, was documented as significantly worsening early marriage risks. Studies found that when schools closed, girls were at increased risk of permanent dropout and that early marriage rates were observed to rise during this period.2 The causal logic was straightforward and devastating: when a girl is no longer in education, the primary argument for delaying her marriage disappears. When her family’s income collapses because informal work stops, the economic pressure to reduce household size intensifies. The pandemic did not create the conditions for early marriage. It removed the thin barriers that had been holding those conditions in partial check.
The Consequences for Girls Are Severe and Well-Documented
The research documents early marriage’s consequences with clinical precision. Girls who married early faced early pregnancy with all the associated health risks for adolescent bodies, school dropout, limited autonomy in their new households, and increased vulnerability to intimate partner violence.3
The connection to intimate partner violence deserves particular attention. Research documented that young wives in the camps, girls who had married with minimal agency, into households where the power differential was extreme, with no education, no income, and no legal standing, were among the most vulnerable to violence from their husbands. And the same conditions that drove early marriage namely economic dependence, restricted mobility, normalised male authority, absence of legal remedies, were the conditions that trapped them in that violence once it began.
The Shadow Markets of Protection
One research team developed a framework that gives this dynamic its most searching name: ‘shadow markets of protection.’4 Under conditions of statelessness and legal exclusion, Rohingya women and families are forced to navigate informal protection economies, systems in which marriages, transactional relationships, and other arrangements function as survival strategies rather than free choices. A father who gives his daughter to an older man in exchange for economic security is not exercising Islamic guardianship. He is navigating a system that has stripped him of the conditions under which genuine guardianship is possible.
This framing matters enormously for how Muslim communities should understand what they are looking at. Early marriage among Rohingya girls in the camps is not, primarily, the expression of a religious or cultural preference. It is a rational response , rational in the narrowest economic sense to a situation of extreme vulnerability. The problem is not that fathers love their religion too much. The problem is that they have been placed in conditions where the choices available to them are all bad, and marriage has been made to look like the least-bad one.
Early marriage rates rose in displacement. Not because Islam demands it. Because desperation does.
III. What Islam Actually Requires of Marriage
There is a version of Islam that is deployed in Muslim communities to justify early and forced marriage. It points to historical precedent, to the age of ʿĀʾisha at her marriage, to a general principle that Islam permits marriage after puberty, to the authority of fathers as walīs to make decisions for their daughters. It uses authentic Islamic vocabulary to dress an arrangement that serves economic and social interests as though it were a religious obligation.
This version of Islam deserves to be read carefully and then challenged carefully, from within the tradition itself. Not from outside Islam. From inside it.
What Marriage Is For
The Quran describes the purpose and nature of marriage in a verse that is among the most frequently cited in Islamic wedding ceremonies and among the least frequently examined for what it actually demands:
وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ أَنْ خَلَقَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا لِّتَسْكُنُوا إِلَيْهَا وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً
"And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquillity in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy." Qur'an 30:21
Three things: sukūn (tranquillity, rest, peace), mawadda (affection, love), and raḥma (mercy). These are not incidental features of a good marriage. They are the stated divine purpose of marriage as an institution. They are what Allah says He placed marriage in the world to produce.
Now ask honestly: does a marriage arranged between a fourteen-year-old girl and an older man she has not chosen, driven by her family’s economic desperation, in conditions where she has no legal standing or independent resources, does that marriage have a reasonable prospect of producing sukūn, mawadda, and raḥma? The research answers that question. It does not produce tranquillity. It produces early pregnancy, school dropout, limited autonomy, and elevated risk of intimate partner violence.
A marriage that cannot reasonably produce what Allah says marriage is for is not, in the fullest Islamic sense, the marriage Islam envisions.
The Condition of Consent That Cannot Be Negotiated Away
The question of consent in Islamic marriage is not a modern import from secular feminism. It is a classical Islamic legal requirement, documented in the hadith literature with specificity and force.
"A virgin came to the Prophet ﷺ and mentioned that her father had married her against her will, so the Prophet ﷺ gave her the choice [to remain in the marriage or leave it]." Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 2096 — graded Ṣaḥīḥ (authentic) by al-Albānī
This hadith is not obscure. It is in the foundational hadith collections. A woman came to the Prophet ﷺ and said her father had married her without her consent. The Prophet ﷺ did not tell her to accept it. He did not lecture her about her father’s rights as a walī. He gave her the choice. The classical jurists across the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, and Ḥanbalī schools acknowledged some form of the right to refuse, differing primarily on the extent and conditions of that right, but not on its existence.
"The widow is not to be married until she is consulted, and the virgin is not to be married until her permission is sought. They said: O Messenger of Allah, how is her permission given? He said: By her silence." Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 5136; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no. 1419 — graded Ṣaḥīḥ
The Prophet ﷺ was asked a practical question: how does a virgin give consent if shyness prevents her from speaking? His answer that silence may indicate consent and has sometimes been taken to mean that silence is always sufficient. But read in context, the hadith establishes something far more important: the question of the woman’s permission must be actively sought. It cannot be assumed. It cannot be bypassed. It must be asked.
A father who arranges his fourteen-year-old daughter’s marriage to solve a financial problem, without genuinely seeking her consent, without ensuring she understands her situation and has a real choice, is not fulfilling his role as a walī. He is using the authority of a walī to serve interests that are not his daughter’s.
The Walī’s Role Is Protective, Not Proprietary
Islamic guardianship in marriage (the role of the walī) is one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts in this conversation. The walī is not the owner of his daughter’s marriage. He is her protector within it.
The scholars were clear that the walī’s role exists to serve the woman’s interests to ensure she is not taken advantage of, that the man is suitable, that the mahr (dowry) is appropriate, that the conditions of the marriage protect her. Ibn Qudāma, the great Ḥanbalī jurist, wrote that guardianship exists for the benefit of the ward, not the guardian. When guardianship is exercised in the guardian’s interests rather than the ward’s, it has exceeded its Islamic boundaries.
A father who marries his daughter to reduce his household’s financial burden is not exercising guardianship on her behalf. He is exercising it on his own behalf and on behalf of a system of economic desperation that Islam did not create and does not endorse.
The Prophet (ﷺ) Who Asked Girls What They Wanted
The sunnah gives us a model of how the Prophet (ﷺ) actually dealt with young women facing marriage arrangements they had not chosen. Beyond the hadith cited above, there is the well-known case of the daughter of Khansāʾ bint Khidhām al-Anṣāriyya, whose father married her against her will after she had previously been married. She went to the Prophet (ﷺ). He annulled the marriage.5
He did not tell her that her father knew best. He did not tell her that her discomfort was a test from Allah. He annulled the marriage. The father’s authority was real and it had been overstepped. The Prophet (ﷺ) said so, plainly, through action.
A father who marries his daughter to reduce his household’s financial burden is not exercising guardianship on her behalf. He is using it against her. The Prophet ﷺ annulled such marriages. We must find the courage to say the same.
What About Historical Precedents?
The question of ʿĀʾisha’s age at marriage is raised in almost every conversation about early marriage in Muslim communities, and it deserves a direct response. Classical scholars differed substantially on the historical details of this marriage, with some placing her age at marriage much higher than the figure commonly cited. More importantly, even scholars who accept the traditional account are clear that the Prophet (ﷺ) was given specific divine dispensations that do not apply to the rest of the ummah, his marriages followed different rules in several respects, as the Quran itself acknowledges.
More fundamentally: the Prophet’s (ﷺ) treatment of women throughout his prophetic career, his command to seek consent, his annulment of forced marriages, his documented tenderness and consultation with his wives, his description of the best of men as those best to their wives establishes a standard that cannot be reduced to a single historical incident. If we want to know what Islam requires of marriage, we read the Quran on sukūn and mawadda and raḥma. We read the hadith on consent. We read the sīra on how the Prophet (ﷺ) actually treated women. That cumulative picture is far more demanding than the version of Islam that is used to justify marrying a fourteen-year-old girl to an older man because her family is struggling to eat.
IV. The Conversation We Keep Not Having
Early marriage in Muslim communities is protected by a particular kind of silence not the silence of ignorance, but the silence of discomfort. People know it happens. Religious leaders know it happens. Community members know it happens. The silence is sustained by a combination of factors: the belief that it is religiously permitted and therefore not to be questioned, the fear of being seen as importing Western values into Islamic spaces, the loyalty to community norms that makes naming harm feel like betrayal, and the genuine complexity of situations where early marriage is the response to real material desperation.
None of these factors justifies the silence. Let us take them one by one.
‘It Is Islamically Permitted’
The argument that early marriage is Islamically permitted because classical scholars did not set a specific minimum age is technically accurate in a narrow sense and profoundly misleading in every practical sense. Scholars operated in contexts where girls were considered adults at puberty because life expectancy was short, social structures were different, and the educational and economic alternatives available to girls today did not exist. They also operated with the full force of the hadith on consent, the principle of lā ḍarar wa lā ḍirār (no harm shall be inflicted or reciprocated), and the overarching obligation to serve the ward’s welfare rather than the guardian’s interests.
Contemporary scholars including scholars from within conservative traditions have increasingly argued that the conditions of our time require a different application of these principles. When the research documents that early marriage in displacement settings produces early pregnancy, school dropout, limited autonomy, and elevated risk of intimate partner violence, the Islamic principle of preventing harm applies directly. A marriage that produces documented harm is not a marriage that Islam endorses simply because no scholar set a minimum age in the ninth century.
‘We Should Not Import Western Values’
This objection mistakes the source of the critique for the content of it. The case against early forced marriage made in this article is not drawn from Western feminist theory. It is drawn from Quran 30:21 on the purpose of marriage. From Sunan Abī Dāwūd no. 2096 on the Prophet’s (ﷺ) annulment of forced marriages. From the principle of walāya as protection of the ward’s interests. From the hadith on consent. From lā ḍarar wa lā ḍirār.
If these sources are ‘Western values,’ the accusation says more about how far some Muslim communities have drifted from their own tradition than about any external influence on this argument.
To Parents
The research makes clear that the fathers and mothers arranging these marriages are not acting from cruelty. They are acting from love and fear in conditions of genuine desperation. This is worth saying plainly, and it should shape how communities respond with support and resources, not only with condemnation.
But love and fear, however genuine, do not produce Islamic outcomes automatically. A father who genuinely loves his daughter and genuinely wants to protect her will seek to understand what the evidence says about what actually protects her and the evidence says that early marriage in displacement settings does not protect her. It concentrates harm on her. The most Islamic thing a father can do for his daughter in a refugee camp is to fight for her education, advocate for her rights, delay her marriage until she can freely choose, and trust that Allah’s design for marriage sukūn, mawadda, raḥma cannot be produced by desperation.
To Imams and Community Leaders
The solemnisation of early and forced marriages is a form of participation in the harm they produce. An imam who performs a nikāḥ for a fourteen-year-old girl and an older man, in the knowledge that she has not meaningfully consented, that the arrangement was driven by economic desperation, and that the research documents the harm this produces that imam has not fulfilled an Islamic obligation. He has lent Islamic authority to an arrangement that Islamic principles do not support.
Refusing to perform such ceremonies is not cultural imperialism. It is fidelity to the hadith that the Prophet (ﷺ) gave her the choice. It is fidelity to the Quran’s description of what marriage is supposed to produce. It is the hard, unglamorous work of Islamic leadership.
V. What the Islamic Alternative Looks Like
Naming early forced marriage as a harm and as incompatible with Islam’s stated purposes for marriage is necessary but not sufficient. The research also points toward what actually helps. Here are concrete starting points.
1. Keep girls in education by any means available. The research is unambiguous: educational opportunity is the most effective structural barrier to early marriage. When girls are in school, the arguments for marrying them now weaken. When schools close, those arguments strengthen. Muslim communities and organisations with any capacity to fund, support, or advocate for girls’ education in displacement settings are doing one of the most concretely Islamic things possible.
2. Address the economic conditions that make early marriage rational. A family that is choosing early marriage as a survival strategy needs economic support, not only moral instruction. Zakat, sadaqa, and advocacy for livelihood programmes that reach Rohingya women directly reduce the material pressure that makes early marriage feel necessary. Organisations working on cash transfers, skills training, and economic empowerment for Rohingya families are addressing the root of the problem, not only its symptoms.
3. Name consent as a non-negotiable Islamic requirement out loud, in community spaces. The hadith on consent is not obscure. It is in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. It should be cited in Friday sermons, in Islamic parenting classes, in pre-marital counselling sessions. The Prophet (ﷺ) gave a woman who had been married without her consent the choice to leave. That story should be as familiar to Muslim communities as any other story from the sīra.
4. Support organisations working on child protection in displacement settings. The research documents that early marriage rates rose during COVID-19 when learning centres closed. The organisations that keep those learning centres open that provide safe spaces, education, and support for girls in the camps are the organisations directly interrupting the conditions that drive early marriage. They deserve Muslim community support as a matter of Islamic principle.
5. Have the specific conversation, not the general one. The silence that protects early forced marriage in Muslim communities is sustained by a preference for general statements over specific ones. ‘Islam values marriage’ is a general statement. ‘A marriage driven by economic desperation that the girl has not consented to does not fulfil the Quranic conditions for marriage’ is a specific one. The specific one is harder to say. It is also the one that changes things.
VI. What Her Marriage Was Supposed to Be
The father in the opening story of this article is not a villain. He is a man who loved his daughter and ran out of options. The system that left him with only bad choices — the statelessness, the legal exclusion, the poverty, the insecurity, the collapsed educational infrastructure is the villain. And that system is not Islamic.
Islam did not create the conditions in Cox’s Bazar. But Muslim communities, by their silence and sometimes by their active participation, have allowed Islamic language to be used to dress the consequences of those conditions as though they were requirements of the faith. They are not requirements. They are compromises made under duress, given Islamic names to make them bearable.
The daughter in the opening story deserved a marriage that waited until she was ready. That asked her what she wanted. That gave her a husband chosen with her participation rather than over her head. That produced, as Allah says marriage is supposed to produce, sukūn, rest and peace in a life that had already seen too little of either.
وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً
"And He placed between you affection and mercy." Qur'an 30:21
Mawadda and raḥma. Affection and mercy. These are Allah’s words for what He placed in marriage and they are the standard against which every marriage, including every early marriage, including every arranged marriage driven by desperation, should be measured.
A marriage built on desperation is not a marriage built on deen. And a community that allows desperation to be dressed as deen has not protected its daughters. It has failed them in this world, and in the accounting that will come.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The Invisible Half is a five-part Islamic educational series drawing on a peer-reviewed systematic literature review of 34 studies on Rohingya women's experiences (2014–2025). Article 1 examines distorted guardianship and male gatekeeping. Article 2 examines the Islamic obligation to bear witness. Article 4 addresses mental health and the prophetic model of emotional healing. Article 5 examines Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah and practical action.
REFERENCES
1 Ainul, S., Ehsan, I., Haque, E., Amin, S., Naved, R. T., Meyer, C., Psaki, S., & Austrian, K. (2018). Marriage and sexual and reproductive health of Rohingya adolescents and youth in Bangladesh: A qualitative study. Population Council. https://doi.org/10.31899/PGY7.1022. See also: Sang, D. (2018). One year on: Time to put women and girls at the heart of the Rohingya response. Oxfam International. https://doi.org/10.21201/2018.3194
2 Kumar, B., Bezon, J., & Haque, M. E. (2022). Covid-19 and the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: Socioeconomic and health impacts on women and adolescents. International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 18(2), 163–188. https://doi.org/10.21315/ijaps2022.18.2.8. See also: Sultana, R. et al. (2023). PLOS Global Public Health, 3(2), Article e0000451.
3 Ainul et al. (2018), op. cit. See also: Sang (2018), op. cit. Early marriage consequences documented across multiple included studies include early pregnancy, school dropout, reduced autonomy, and elevated intimate partner violence risk.
4 Khan, I. A., Hossain, M. S., & Rahman, M. M. (2025). Rohingya women and the shadow markets of protection: A study of gendered vulnerability in South and Southeast Asia. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7183932/v1. Note: This is a preprint and has not undergone peer review; findings should be interpreted with appropriate caution.
5 Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 5138. A woman came to the Prophet ﷺ reporting that her father had married her against her will. The Prophet ﷺ gave her the right to have the marriage annulled.
All Qur’anic translations follow Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran) with minor adaptation for clarity. All hadith gradings are as cited from primary collections.