User:TrangaBellam/Aisha Age

Islamic sources of the classical era list Aisha's age at the time of her marriage as six or seven and nine or ten at its consummation. In a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari, Aisha recollects having been married at six years of age. Ibn Sa'd's biography holds her age at the time of marriage as between six and seven, and gives her age at consummation to be nine while Ibn Hisham's biography of Muhammad suggests she may have been ten years old at consummation. Al-Tabari notes Aisha to have stayed with her parents after the marriage and consummated the relationship at nine years of age since she was young and sexually immature at the time of marriage; however, elsewhere Tabari appears to suggest that she was born during the Jahiliyyah (before 610 C.E), which would translate to an age of about twelve or more at marriage.

In Islamic literature, the young age of her marriage did not draw any significant discourse; nonetheless, Spellberg and Ali finds the very mention of her age to be atypical of early Muslim biographers, and hypothesize a connotation to her virginity and religious purity. Her age did not interest later Muslim scholars either and even went unremarked-upon by medieval and early-modern Christian polemicists. Early Orientalist writers —despite taking a condescending approach towards Muhammad and Islam— did not focus on Aisha's age but instead on Muhammad 's engaging in polygamy, the ethics of marrying for political causes etc. A few however chose to explain the age-gap —passively and without any condemnation—, citing the contemporary understanding of the Orient as a hot place, that promulgated sexually deviant practices.

Beginning late nineteenth century, with the East and its alleged immoralities subject to increasing opprobrium, as the colonizing powers sought to regulate the age of consent and ran into conflicts with local forms of Sharia, pointers to Aisha's age at marriage (and the involved Prophetic precedent) proliferated across the archives in explaining the backwardness of Muslim societies and their reticence to reforms. In response, some Muslims chose to align themselves with the projects of modernization and re-calculated her age — using deft stratagems of omission and commission — to fix it at early adolescence, but conservatives rejected such revisionist readings that flew in the face of ʻilm al-ḥadīth.

Beginning mid-20th century, amidst growing concerns of Islamic extremism, as Muslim societies and Islam itself came under scrutiny, pointed criticisms of Aisha's young age at marriage began to appear; this has since prompted many Muslim scholars to contextualize the traditionally accepted age of Aisha with renewed vigor emphasizing on cultural relativism, anachronism, the political dimensions of the marriage, Aisha's non-ordinary physique etc. In the late-twentieth century and early twenty-first century, Aisha's age has become a tool of Islamophobic polemicists to accuse Muhammad of pedophilia — not as a diagnostic category but as the highest category of evil — and reason for the apparently higher prevalence of child marriage in Muslim societies among other ills.