Terry Firma

What if you’re a Muslim and you want some nookie with someone other than your wife? You can’t go to a prostitute — Allah hates that.

India’s rent-a-wife industry to the rescue! Tourist-friendly! Allah-approved! Perfectly halal!

You see, in India’s Hyderabad and environs, it’s not hard to find marriageable girls who can be talked into one month of wedlock for a couple of thousand dollars.

According to the Telegraph,

[W]ealthy foreigners, local agents and ‘Qazis’ — government-appointed Muslim priests — are exploiting poverty among the city’s Muslim families.

We learn how the scheme works from one of the quasi-wives — an underage girl not keen on being bedded by a “husband” older than her father — who came forward to tell her story.

She escaped from her home last month after her parents pressured her to consummate a forced marriage to a middle aged Sudanese man who had paid around £1,200 for her to be his ‘wife’ for four weeks.

She told police she had been taken by her aunt to a hotel where she and three other teenager girls were introduced to a Sudanese oil company executive. The ‘groom’, Usama Ibrahim Mohammed, 44 and married with two children in Khartoum, later arrived at her home where a Qazi performed a wedding ceremony.

According to Inspector Vijay Kumar, he [Mohammed] had paid 100,000 Rupees (around £1,200) to the girl’s aunt Mumtaz Begum, who in turn paid 70,000 Rupees to her parents, 5,000 Rupees to the Qazi, 5,000 Rupees to an Urdu translator, and kept 20,000 Rupees herself. The wedding certificate came with a ‘Talaknama,’ which fixed the terms of the divorce at the end of the groom’s holiday.