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........

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