The highest Islamic authority in Saudi Arabia comes out strongly in favor of child molestation.

Saudi Arabia’s most senior Muslim cleric has been quoted as saying it is ‘okay’ for 10-year-old girls to marry.

Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh was quoted as saying those who think such girls are too young to marry are doing them an injustice. Al-Hayat newspaper quotes Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, as also saying during a lecture on Monday that critics who say women should not marry before the age of 25 are following a ‘bad path’.

The mufti’s comments showed the conservative clergy’s opposition to a drive by Saudi rights groups, including government ones, to define the age of marriage and put an end to the phenomenon of child marriages.

‘It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,’ Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh was quoted as saying.

‘A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,’ he said during a Monday lecture, according to the pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper.