4:127-mistranslated to justify marry

This verse has been commonly mistranslated to justify marrying young orphan girls rather than marrying their widow mothers. The mistranslation is so obvious, that it is curious how those who had knowledge of Arabic did not notice it. Unfortunately, this mistranslation helped the justification of marrying girls at a very young age.

Though the Quran permits polygamy to men (4:3), it strictly discourages its actual practice by requiring certain significant preconditions: men may marry more than one wife only if the later ones are widows with children, and they should treat each wife equally and fairly (See 4:19; 127-129.) Unfortunately, verse 4:127 has been traditionally misinterpreted and mistranslated in such a way as to suggest that God permits marriage with juvenile orphans. This is clearly not the case.

The Arabic expression yatam al-nisa illati in 4:127 has been routinely mistranslated as "women orphans, whom..." The expression is also sometimes translated as "orphans of women whom..." This later translation, though accurate, makes the crucial reference of the objective pronoun "whom" ambiguous: Does the phrase after "whom" describe orphans or women?

As it happens, the Arabic plural pronoun in this verse is the female form, allaty (not the male form allazyna), and it can only refer to the women just referenced, not to the orphans. This is because the Arabic word yatama (orphans) is grammatically male in gender!

All the English translations of the Quran that we have seen have mistranslated this passage. This is remarkable, because the correct translation requires only an elementary knowledge of Arabic grammar. This error is thus much more than a simple grammatical slip; it is, we would argue, willful misrepresentation. The traditional interpretation of this passage offers an apparent justification for marriage with children, which flatly contradicts the Quran.

Like so many passages in the Quran, 4:127's meaning was severely distorted in order to gain the favor of rich, dominant males. Over the centuries, male scholars with active libidos have used fabricated hadith to pervert the meaning of this and other Quranic verses relating to marriage and sexuality (See 66:5). For a comparative discussion on verse 4:127, see the Sample Comparisons section in the Introduction(edip).