When Selamha Mint Mohammed celebrated her marriage to Mokhtar Salem in Mauritania in 2006, the 14-year-old girl may not have fully understood the implications of the ceremony, Mauritanian media reports say. A year later, Selamha reported her parents and husband to police in Spain, where they now face long prison sentences on charges including sexual aggression, coercion and domestic violence.
The trial, which was scheduled to continue in the southern city of Cadiz on Thursday, has raised difficult questions about immigration, cultural plurality and interference in both Spain and Mauritania.
Selamha’s parents emigrated in the late 1980s to Puerto Real in southern Spain, where the girl and two other children were born. Her almost illiterate father Mohammed Ould Abdallahi still speaks hardly any Spanish, according to the Spanish daily El Pais.
When Selamha turned 14, Ould Abdallahi accepted, on her behalf, the marriage proposal of her cousin Mokhtar, who was more than 40 years old.
Marriages between young girls and much older men are nothing unusual in Mauritania, according to local media, which see the family as having acted in line with the customs of the north-west African Islamic republic.
Most Mauritanian analysts believe the family’s claim that Selamha entered the marriage voluntarily.
The girl, however, told the court in Cadiz last week that her father threatened to stone her unless she married her suitor and slept with him during a trip to the family’s country of origin.
“He said he would throw the first stone,” Selamha said.
After the wedding in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, Selamha returned with her family to Puerto Real, not seeing Mokhtar again until the businessman came to visit her in 2007.
When the girl refused to resume sexual relations with her husband, “my parents told me they would kill me, burn me or slit my throat,” Selamha told the court via videoconference.
One of the daughters of a Spanish family living nearby, at whose house Selamha often stayed, took her for a medical check-up.
The family also encouraged her to report her parents and husband to police, who immediately detained them.
The parents were deprived of custodianship over Selamha, and ordered to keep a distance of at least 500 metres from their daughter.
The husband, who remains in jail, faces up to 10 years in prison for repeated sexual aggression. The parents, who have been released, could be sentenced to up to 17 years for coercion, domestic violence and humiliating treatment.
Sidi Mohammed Ould Boubacar, the Mauritanian ambassador to Madrid, called for “understanding” for his country’s culture, pointing out that Spain had launched the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations project to boost dialogue between the West and the Muslim world.
The difficulties of that dialogue, however, were becoming evident through the different perceptions of Selamha’s marriage in Spain and Mauritania.
Spanish internet commentators were practically unanimous in praising the girl’s courage and in condemning Mauritanian customs.
Marriages such as Selamha’s represented a “medievalism which became outdated in Europe centuries ago,” one commentator said.
The case demonstrates “the failure of policies defending multiculturalism, because of the guilt complex we drag along in the West and because of permissiveness towards unacceptable behaviours,” another blogger wrote.
Many Mauritanians, on the other hand, see the West as trying to impose its secular customs on Muslims.
Some even suspect that Selamha’s Spanish friends would like her parents to be jailed in order to adopt her and to “place her in a Christian home,” as one young Mauritanian wrote in an internet forum.
Imams preaching at mosques have commented on the case, urging the Mauritanian government to interfere on behalf of Mohammed Ould Abdallahi’s family.
A group of Mauritanian lawyers and senators representing emigrants also contacted the Spanish embassy in Nouakchott, El Pais reported.
Even in the West, girls of Selamha’s age were having sex, the newspaper Le Quotidien de Nouakchott pointed out.
“If our judiciary cannot jail a Spaniard who drinks alcohol in our country, the Spaniards cannot judge alleged social offences” which can only be evaluated in the Mauritanian context, the newspaper Le Renovateur said.