A collage of two photographs showing parents pose with their children after the latter completed the reciting and memorising of the Quran is viral with a false and communal claim that the parents have married their minor children.
The collage features an already debunked photo of a woman and a minor boy who posed after the celebration of Khatam Al-Quran, the complete recitation of the Quran from the beginning to the end. Read BOOM's fact check here. The image has resurfaced with a similar caption.
The second image of a man posing with his daughter has been on the internet since 2016. The photograph is doing the rounds with the claim that a member of the Muslim community married his minor daughter.
The collage has been shared on Facebook with a caption in Hindi which translates to, "As the father married his own daughter, the mother got angry, and married her own son. Islam is such a holy religion.) (Original text in Hindi: बाप ने बेटी के साथ शादी कर ली तो गुस्से में आकर मां ने भी अपने बेटे से शादी कर ली इतना पवित्र धर्म है इस्लाम)
Click here to see the post.
The image featuring the father and the daughter is also viral separately with a similar caption: "Person who accepts his 9-year old daughter as wife… And people who worship 9-year old as goddess cannot be called brothers; there is difference between drain and river."
(Original text in Hindi: 9 साल की बेटी को बीवी मानने वाले... और 9 साल की बेटी को देवी मानने वाले कभी भाई-भाई नहीं हो सकते! फर्क होता है नदी और नाले में. जय माँ भावनी..)
Click here to see the post.
The image had also been tweeted by @rakesh_bstpyp, a verified user on Twitter, whose bio states that the user is a nationalist news editor. The tweet has since been deleted.
The tweet is archived here.
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Fact Check
Image 1
BOOM ran a reverse image search on the viral photograph and found that the image is available on the internet since 2016; the photograph was shared on Facebook on February, 2016 with a separate caption in Urdu which roughly translates to, "Congratulations ... Mashaallah Father and daughter graduated from the same class (became memorizer of the Qur'an) .. must comment. May God write."
Another Facebook post which shared the photograph also captioned it as, "Mubarak father and daughter finished final class of Hafiz al-Quran."
(Original text in Arabic: مبارک ... ماشاءاللہ باپ اور بیٹی ایک ھی کلاس سے فارغ (حافظ القران بن گیا) ..کمینٹ ضرور کرووو . مآشاءاللہ لکھوں)
Further, we were able to find the same photograph on a website's forum, called the Islamic Board. The headline of the forum reads, 7 year old girl from England memorises the entire Quran. The photograph was published on the website on October 2, 2016. The same viral photo was published with a caption, "This father and her daughter became Hafiz-e-Qur'an at the same time. Age is not a barrier for education!" Hafiz is an Islamic title for people who have memorised the holy Quran. Traditionally, followers of the faith and learners of the Quran celebrate after finishing memorising the Quran. The image, therefore, shows a father and daughter celebrating after achieving the title.
We checked the source code of the viral photograph and found that the image was entered on the site, Islamic Board, on the same date.
Image 2
A reverse image search using Yandex showed results for a post dated January 31, 2020 on Facebook with the caption which translated to English reads, "Today was my son's Khatam Al-Quran, Who will share by giving us congratulations." While we could not successfully establish where the viral picture was clicked, were ascertained that the picture shows a woman posing with her son after he finished the full recitation of the Quran. The image was first debunked by Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of Alt News.
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