Madurai:
The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court has ruled that a young Muslim girl cannot be branded an "illegitimate" child because her father had married two sisters, one after the other, despite a specific prohibition under the Muslim Personal Law, which permitted marrying another woman only after 'talaq'.
Dismissing a civil revision petition filed by the Nagercoil Jamath president, Justice S. Palanivelu said that the act committed by the girl's father was a curable irregularity and therefore the children born out of such marriage could not be called illegitimate.
A. Sohail Ahmed (name changed) was a member of the Mahan Tulkasha Olliyullah Darga Vadaseri Kuthba Pallivasal at Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district. He married two sisters and lived with both them. He had five children through the first wife and two daughters through her sister.
In 1997, he filed a civil suit before the Principal Munsif Court at Nagercoil challenging his extermination from the Jamath. Even as the case was pending, a compromise was reached between him and the new office bearers of the Jamath in May 2006.
In February this year, he applied for a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the Jamath to give the girl born out of his second marriage to a groom based in Chennai. But the Jamaths president refused to issue the NOC,a pre-requisite for conducting Muslim marriages.
The judge directed the Jamath to issue a NOC forthwith to Ahmed so that he could conduct her marriage without any hitch in the lawful capacity of being her father.