Aisha and Muhammad

From Brongersma
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

It is not clear when Aisha was born. Most scholars calculate her age by reference to the date of her marriage to Muhammad (622 CE) and then subtracting her age at marriage. However, there are many theories as to her age at marriage. [...] The age of Aisha at marriage is an extremely contentious issue. On the one hand, there are several hadiths which are said to have been narrated by Aisha herself, which claim that she was six or seven years old when betrothed and nine when the marriage was consummated. On the other hand, an early Muslim chronicler, Ibn Ishaq, claims that Aisha may have been 14 to 16 years old, just past the age of puberty, or perhaps even older. Most Muslim scholars have accepted the tradition that Aisha was nine years old when the marriage was consummated. This has in turn led critics to denounce Muhammad for having sexual relations with a girl so young, which in modern times would be classified as pedophilia. A response to this criticism has been that Aisha was post-pubescent at nine and that early marriages were common in most cultures until fairly recent times.

source: 'Aisha'; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Young_marriage_age_controversy; Wikipedia; 2005