No, it isn’t that much of a fringe position - or rather it is, child marriage is rare (depending on your threshold) in all the Arab states I’m familiar with except Yemen, but there is not nearly enough of an outcry against that fringe position. The one exception I’m familiar with is Iraq, where there were recently protests against a new law allowing child marriage. I feel this is the case with many of the most serious issues in Muslim societies: people don’t partake in heinous behaviour but they don’t go out of their way to discuss it or condemn it, much less organise social movements to outlaw it. And those social movements are needed in those states that allow child marriage.

I feel like the entire Epstein affair was quite awkward for people from my neck of the woods because their outrage wasn’t over the concepts of minors, rape or paedophilia (a word people rarely use) but over “prostitution”, human trafficking, deceit and generally low morals. The whole “these were literal children” part of the global outrage did not really have as much of a pendant here. On social media the major takeaway seemed to be “Americans doing American things” and “Rich Jews doing rich-Jew things”. That was my impression of the discourse, anyway.

Even if extreme or criminal behaviour is not representative of a society, that society should still be judged by the manner in which it deals with those activities.