ISLAMABAD — The Federal Constitutional Court on Friday (July 24) agreed to reconsider its own judgment upholding the marriage of a 13-year-old Christian girl to a Muslim man more than double her age, a ruling that had alarmed Christians and Hindus, whose daughters are most often taken in such cases. The judgment of February 3 settled three propositions at once. The court declined to inquire into whether a minor's conversion was genuine, holding it immaterial whether it reflected a spiritual transformation or was a device to contract the marriage. A child marriage remains valid, under the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929 as applicable in Punjab, even though solemnising it is an offence. And the man she married becomes, by virtue of that marriage, her lawful guardian — her wali.
A two-member bench of Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi and Justice Aamer Farooq admitted the review petition for hearing and issued notices to the girl's husband, Shehryar Ahmad, the Attorney General for Pakistan and the Advocate General of Punjab. Human rights organisations have reported Ahmad's age at the time of the marriage as 30; the court record does not state it. The matter will be taken up after the court's summer recess, which ends in the first week of September. Maria remains in Ahmad's custody.
Review petitions are seldom entertained in Pakistan. The court must be satisfied that an error is apparent on the face of the record, not merely that a different conclusion was available. Justice Farooq asked counsel to identify the touchstone on which review lay. Muhammad Saqib Jillani, appearing for Maria's father Shahbaz Masih, submitted that the February judgment had decided a question no party had raised, while the two questions actually before the court went undecided: whether a girl below the age of 16 can lawfully contract a marriage, and what legal value attaches to a statement recorded under section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code by a minor.
Justice Rizvi, who conducted most of the questioning, asked what the legal status of a marriage involving a child should be. Jillani replied that any such marriage should be annulled, and said this was the central basis of the review. The bench at the beginning of the hearing declined, at this stage, to implead two non-government organisations – True Christian Spirit and Legal Aid Society – as parties in Shahbaz Masih's petition. Justice Rizvi said the court was the guardian of all communities and respected every faith practised in Pakistan, and that the case should not be cast as a communal or religious issue.
The judges assured the organisations that they remained open to their assistance, but asked what work they had done, beyond appearing in court, to protect girls from men who lure them away in this manner. The organizations are expected to be heard alongside at a later stage. The bench also said the consequences of the case were not confined to religious minorities. Girls who leave home to marry are in many cases killed by their own families on their return, or refused shelter by them, the judges observed, and any decision would have to be mindful of those ground realities.
The grounds of review
Jillani submitted that Shahbaz Masih had never contended that a marriage between a Christian woman and a Muslim man was impermissible under Islamic law. The court's reliance on Marina Jatoi (PLD 1967 SC 580) and Zainab Bibi (PLD 1981 SC 56) was therefore beside the point. Marriage in Pakistan is not governed by a religion-neutral civil code. It is solemnised under religion-specific personal laws, and the faith of the parties determines which law applies. In practice the religious and official functions merge in one person: a Muslim marriage is performed by a maulvi who also holds the Nikah Registrar's licence issued by the Union Council. Families expect a religious figure to perform the ceremony, not a state functionary.
Islamic law permits a Muslim man to marry a Christian or Jewish woman but not the reverse, and where the woman remains Christian the marriage must be performed under the Christian Marriage Act, 1872, but still almost all marriages like that of Maria are performed under the Muslim Family Ordinance 1961, which requires both parties to be Muslim.
As Maria had converted to Islam and married under Muslim law, Jillani's principal argument was that the court had not taken into account the most relevant authority in the field: the Federal Shariat Court's (FSC) judgment in Ali Azhar v. Province of Sindh (PLD 2023 FSC 265), which upheld the minimum marriage age of 18 under the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2013 as consistent with the injunctions of Islam.
The bench said the court was the guardian of all communities and respected every faith practised in Pakistan, and that the case should not be cast as a communal or religious issue.
That FSC judgment had its origins in another Catholic child's marriage. Arzoo Raja was 13 when she disappeared from outside her home in Karachi in October 2020 and was produced days later as the wife of Ali Azhar, a neighbour 44 years old. She told the Sindh High Court she was 18 and had married of her own free will; her parents' NADRA record put her at 13, and a medical board at 14 to 15. In November 2020 the court held she appeared to be underage and could not have contracted a marriage of her own will, sent her to a shelter home and directed police to proceed against Azhar under the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2013. Azhar went on to challenge that Act before the Federal Shariat Court as repugnant to Islam. He lost, and the judgment he lost under is the one now being pressed against the Constitutional Court.
That judgment, Jillani said, turned on a distinction the February ruling never engaged. Islamic law, the FSC held, requires not only sexual maturity — bulugh — but also mental maturity, or rushd, citing Verse 6 of Surah An-Nisa. Classical jurists treated the two as separate; Imam Abu Hanifa regarded 25 as a reasonable age for the appearance of rushd but the February judgment discussed puberty alone. Jillani further argued that marriage in Islam is a contract, that a minor cannot lawfully enter into one, and that Maria's statements before the courts about her age and her marriage therefore carry no legal value.
On the evidence, the petition says the court disbelieved official documents without recording any evidence of its own. Maria's NADRA record gives her date of birth as October 7, 2012, which would have made her twelve when she married. The February judgment set it aside, citing the delay in registration, a discrepancy with her sister's recorded date of birth and the age her father had given in the First Information Report, and noting that she was present in court and appeared older. The conversion certificate it accepted was issued two days after the marriage.
Reaction
Chaudhry Safdar, chairman of Rah-e-Nijat Ministry — Path of Deliverance — whose organisation has been instrumental in pursuing the legal case on behalf of Shahbaz Masih, welcomed the court's decision to take up the review. He said the community expected that more aspects of the case would now be heard from its side, and that the court's eventual decision would protect girls in similar situations.
Tahira Abdullah, a social activist, rejected the description of the case as a marriage or an elopement, calling it an abduction. Behind such incidents, she said, lay a resentment of some towards non-Muslims living in the country who expressed their displeasure through several means including such conversions orchestrated as marriage.
Mary James Gill, executive director of the Centre for Law and Justice and a former member of the Punjab Assembly, said the court had rightly identified the need to establish the circumstances in which girls are drawn into such marriages. She said she had contributed the Pakistan component of a study titled Ideologically Motivated Sexual Grooming, conducted by the Professor Tadros of Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
Gill said she attended the hearing with other lawyers on a committee formed after the February judgment at the initiative of Federal Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, and now convened by the Full Gospel Assemblies of Pakistan as an observer. The committee is working on reform of Christian personal law, she said — a direction in which Mari’s case has pushed the Christian community. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on the case on July 9, calling for Maria's access to legal representation, her family and psychological support, and for an impartial review.
Background
Shahbaz Masih registered FIR. No. 5144/2025 at Police Station Nawab Town, Lahore, on July 30, 2025, under sections 363 and 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, stating that his daughter had left home for breakfast the previous morning and had not returned. The case was cancelled after she recorded a statement before a magistrate on July 31 saying that nobody had abducted her and that she had married of her own free will.
The father lost at every level that followed. A writ petition for recovery was dismissed by the Lahore High Court on August 25. A petition under section 491 of the Criminal Procedure Code was dismissed by an Additional Sessions Judge on October 9, who held that the validity of a nikahnama could not be determined in summary proceedings — this after the Secretary of the Union Council had appeared in separate revisional proceedings and disowned its execution and registration. The High Court dismissed the challenge to that order on October 17. The Constitutional Court refused leave on February 3.