Aisha's Age: Difference between revisions

Aisha (‘Ā’ishah, c. 613/614 –c. 678)^[1] or عائشة, (also transliterated as A'ishah, Aisyah, Ayesha, A'isha, Aishat, or Aishah) was married to Muhammad at the age of 6 or 7, and the marriage was consummated by Muhammad, then 53, when Aisha was aged 9 or 10 according to sahih hadith tradition.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} Due to concerns about child marriage this topic is of heavy interest in the apologetic literature and public discourse.

Marriage at a young age was not unheard of in Arabia at the time, and Aisha's marriage to Muhammad may have had a political connotation, as her father Abu Bakr was an influential man in the community.^[7] Abu Bakr, on his part, may have sought to further the bond of kinship between Muhammad and himself by joining their families together in marriage via Aisha. Egyptian-American Islamic scholar, Leila Ahmed, notes that Aisha's betrothal and marriage to Muhammad are presented as ordinary in Islamic literature, and may indicate that it was not unusual for children to be married to their elders in that era.^[8] In the neighbouring empires at that time, Byzantine law forbade marriage to girls below the age of puberty, which they fixed at thirteen years of age^[9], while Sasanian law provided that a girl might marry at the age of nine years so long as consummation of the union was delayed until she reached the age of twelve years.^[10]

Authenticity

In the Quran, a rule concerning marriage to those who have not yet reached menstruation appears in Chapter 65 "Al Talaq" verse 4.^[11] Tafsir al-Jalalayn is one of the most respected commentaries on the Quran.^[12] In the Tafsir al-Jalalayn exegesis for this verse it describes "those you have yet to menstruate" as "those who have not yet menstruated, because of their young age, their [waiting] period shall [also] be three months."^[13]

In the modern era, Aisha's age at marriage has been a source of controversy and debate. Some Muslims have attempted to revise the previously-accepted timeline of her life.^[14] The hadith corpus provide records of early Islam through allegedly "unbroken chain of witnesses". Various hadiths stating that Aisha was either nine or ten at the time of her consummation come from collections with sahih status, meaning they are regarded as reputable by the majority of Muslims. Some other traditional sources also mention Aisha's age. The sira of Ibn Ishaq as edited by Ibn Hisham states that she was nine or ten years old at the consummation. The historian al-Tabari also states that she was nine.^[15][16]

Islamic modernist scholars generally question the reliability of traditionally authentic hadiths and biographical material. Modern academic research indicates that the hadiths which specify Aisha's age at the time of her marriage and consummation trace back to a formulation circulated by her great nephew, Hisham b. 'Urwa, after he moved to Iraq where it found a receptive audience probably for proto-sectarian reasons (see discussion below).

Association with child marriage

No age limits have been fixed by Islam for contracting a marriage according to Persian Professor at the University of Cambridge, Reuben Levy, and "quite young children may be legally married".^[17] The girl may not live with the husband however until she is fit for marital sexual relations.

In Islamic legal terminology, Baligh refers to a person who has reached maturity, puberty or adulthood and has full responsibility under Islamic law. Legal theorists assign different ages and criteria for reaching this state for both males and females.^[18] In marriage baligh is related to the Arabic legal expression, hatta tutiqa'l-rijal, which means that consummation of the marriage may not take place until the girl is physically fit to engage in sexual intercourse. A number of jurists said consummation may occur even before puberty if the girl was considered to have reached this state.

Shafi'i used the example of Aisha's marriage in support of his view that a father may enter his virgin minor daughter into a marriage contract and Ibn Hanbal used the age of nine for some related rulings (see Forced Marriage and Child Marriage in Islamic Law).

Relevant quotations

Much further hadith evidence is collated in Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars: Aisha.

In the incident of the slander (al-ifk), widely reported in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Aisha was accused of committing adultery after she was left behind by the caravan.

In the narrations of this incident which almost led to Muhammad divorcing her, Aisha is repeatedly referred to as a girl of young age (jariyatun hadithatu s-sinni جَارِيَةٌ حَدِيثَةُ السِّنِّ), twice by herself, and once by her slave-girl, Buraira. Aisha states "At that time I was a young lady", and "I was a young girl and did not have much knowledge of the Quran" (both use the same arabic phrase just mentioned). Buraira says, "I have never seen in her anything faulty except that she is a girl of immature age, who sometimes sleeps and leaves the dough for the goats to eat."

The detailed hadith of this incident is widely transmitted from Aisha through 'Urwa b. al-Zubayr (her nephew), through his student Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri. A brief answer to a question about the names of her accusers (though with no further detail) also appears in a letter by 'Urwa, transmitted through his son, Hisham.^[19]

The same phrase occurs in narrations about Muhammad screening Aisha with his garment when some Ethiopians were playing (e.g. Sahih Bukhari 7:62:163). One version of a hadith about Aisha experiencing menstruation while on pilgrimage to Mecca too describes her uses the same phrase (Sahih Muslim 2:2773) though the other narrations of that hadith do not include the phrase (one explicitly points out its absence: Sahih Muslim 7:2774).

Modern academic views

Provenance and dating of the marital age hadith

The most comprehensive academic treatment of the hadith about Aisha's marital age was produced by Dr Joshua Little for his PhD thesis in 2022.^[20][21] An important tool in the modern academic analysis of widely transmitted hadiths is isnad-cum-matn Analysis (ICMA). The isnad is the transmission chain attributed to a particular narration and the matn is its wording. In the ICMA method, the isnad tree of a widely transmitted hadith is compared with clusters of variation in the matn to see how well they corroborate one another. Often, this leads to the identification of one or more common links i.e. the person from whom transmissions start to branch out, even if the chain may continue back by a single strand before that person. The technique is helpful for dating when a hadith started to circulate and to identify who might have first formulated it in such a way, though not necessarily whether there is any historical kernal to the events reported therein. Dr Little has outlined 21 reasons why hadiths are known to be very unreliable in a historical sense by modern academic scholarship.^[22]

After an extensive search for available transmissions of the Aisha marital age hadith, Little performed ICMA analysis to identify a small number of common links whose matns he could reconstruct, while others could be dismissed as common links due to having contradictory or disparate matns ascribed to them, which in turn exhibit a range of further problems. Various single strand ascriptions are also dismissed as dubious.

Aside from Hisham b. 'Urwa (d. 146 AH), who was Aisha's great nephew and whose narration is most widely transmitted, Muhammad b. 'Amr (d. 144 AH) is the other reconstructable Medinan common link (though both of them moved to Iraq). The other early ones are three Kufans (in Iraq) who died 146-160 AH.

Little then analyzes in greater depth his reconstructed matns for these common links. Based on shared words, phrases and sequencing, he concludes that they all derive from a single simple formulation, and are not independently transmitted memories of a common event. This original formulation seems to be the widely transmitted one of Hisham (who also transmitted some more detailed versions). Hisham attributed it to his father, 'Urwa (falsely, argues Little). Later transmissions raised the isnad of the story further to make it narrated by Aisha herself.

Hisham seems to have transmitted the hadith after he moved to Iraq. There are a few transmissions ascribed to his Medinan students, though these are each dubious for various reasons. The hadith seems to have been unknown in Medina, as it is not mentioned in the biographical works of Ibn Ishaq nor (it seems) Musa b. 'Uqbah, nor does it feature in Maliki legal texts, where Little believes it would be expected to feature had it been circulating in Medina. Little is also doubtful about the Kufan common links because the marital age hadith does not occur in early Kufan legal hadith compilations.

After concluding that Hisham is responsible for the formulation of the story into the hadith from which all others ultimately derive, Little goes on to argue that Hisham concocted the story entirely. Hisham was accused of being an unreliable transmitter after his move to Iraq, and the hadith about his great aunt would have been useful there. Aisha's virginity at the time of her marriage and her status as Muhammad's favourite wife was a basic feature of proto Sunni polemics against the proto-Shi'i, especially in Kufah where the latter were dominant, and Hisham's hadith must have been very welcome there as it was immediately incorporated into this Kufan proto-Sunni material about the virtues of Aisha.

Other considerations

A different explanation for the Medinan legal silence on Aisha's age, as well as the hadith's non-use by many later scholars was alluded to by Carolyn Baugh in her 2017 book, Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law. Maliki law was based largely on Medinan community custom, though sometimes anecdotes about companions were used for making specific points. Contrary to Little, Baugh doubts how useful the Aisha hadith would actually have been for legal purposes.^[23] Indeed, unlike various reports about companions the Aisha hadith does not seem to be of any use for the areas of juristic disagreement or the points which they felt a need to prove (see Child Marriage in Islamic Law). Shafi'i is the first legal scholar to use it, though he had to read in his own assumptions to do so (see Forced Marriage). The Aisha hadith merely states that her marriage was contracted when she was six (or seven), presumably before puberty, and it does not specify whether she was consulted or forced by her father, nor even whether she had reached puberty at nine.

The case is nevertheless strong that Hisham formulated the Aisha marital age hadith in Iraq, though a couple of traditions which do not depend on that hadith may support the possibility of a historical kernal. The hadiths quoted above about the incident of the slander (al-Ifk) do not involve Hisham and emphasise that Aisha was then "a girl of young age", though the historicity of this too might be doubted given the polemical considerations around the event.

More significant may be an independent tradition which Little says can provisionally be traced back to the Medinan historian Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124 AH). Al-Zuhri's hadith states that the Messenger of God married Aisha bint Abu Bakr in Shawwal in the tenth year after the prophethood, three years before the migration, and he arranged the marriage feast in Medina (i.e. for consummation) in Shawwal, at the beginning of eight months after his emigration to Medina. Little speculates that Hisham picked a consummation age of nine and used this report of a three year gap between Aisha's marriage and consumation to derive six or seven as the age of her marriage.^[24] Others may notice another significance to this apparently earlier al-Zuhri tradition. The three year gap between marriage and consummation mentioned therein, without any obvious polemical function (no age is mentioned), probably and independently implies that Aisha was a child at the time.

Apologetic history

The majority of scholars today agree that Aisha was 9 when her marriage to Prophet Muhammad was consummated. This has been the mainstream Muslim understanding throughout Islam's 1,400 year history.^[25] The first recorded objection raised to Aisha's age was by Maulana Muhammad Ali who lived from 1874 to 1951.^[26] However, he is not considered credible to the Sunni sect since he belonged to the Ahmadiyya sect whose beliefs drastically differ from mainstream Islam. The Ahmadiyya and their writings are also heavily focused on missionary work.^[27]

Adding to Ali's objections, there is Habib Ur Rahman Siddiqui Kandhalvi (1924-1991) who in his Urdu booklet, "Tehqiq e umar e Siddiqah e Ka'inat" (English trans. 1997), laments that he is "tired of defending this tradition" that is "laughed" at and "ridiculed" by English-educated individuals he meets in Karachi who claim it is against "sagacity and prudence" and "preferred English society to Islam over this", and he readily admits his "aim is to produce an answer to the enemies of Islam who spatter mud at the pious body of the Generous Prophet".^[28] A posthumous fatwa was issued against him in November 2004, labelling him a "Munkir-e-Hadith" (hadith rejector) and a "Kafir" (infidel) on the basis of being a rejector of hadith.^[29]

Deriving arguments from both Habib Ur Rahman and Muhammad Ali, Moiz Amjad (who refers to himself as "The Learner") is the most recent reference to online apologetic. Moiz admits to having lifted his arguments from them, summarizing and presenting them in response to a Muslim asking him how he can respond to critical Christians.^[30] With Moiz's restructured response the arguments originating from the Ahmadiyya in the 1920s and 1930s finally achieved a little popularity among a few orthodox Muslims. However, this popularity seems to be strictly limited to articles or arguments on the Internet and not between contemporary sheikhs and scholars.

In July 2005, Shaykh Dr. Gibril Haddad responded to Moiz Amjad's polemics with, "Our Mother A'isha's Age At The Time Of Her Marriage to The Prophet."^[31] Shaykh Haddad was listed amongst the inaugural "500 most influential Muslims in the world"^[32] and is considered a Muslim scholar and muhaddith (hadith expert).^[32] Haddad included many facts that are easily verifiable for those who have access to the hadith and sira literature. For example, his analysis highlighted the fact that many of the arguments were based solely on faulty assumptions taken from hadiths completely unrelated to Aisha's age, or were misrepresenting the sources that were being cited (i.e. hadiths actually in support the idea that Aisha was 9). His reply has not yet been answered by Moiz Amjad.

However, Haddad's response did not stop Amjad's arguments from being rehashed by apologists on the Internet with the same missionary and apologetic focus. Other transmitters of these arguments include, but are not limited to; T.O Shavanas,^[33] “Imam” Chaudhry (word-for-word plagiarism of Amjad's work),^[34] Zahid Aziz,^[26] Nilofar Ahmed,^[35] and David Liepert.^[36]

Modern apologetic perspectives

Some Muslim authors have eschewed the traditionally-accepted ahadith and attempted to calculate Aisha's age based on details found in other ahadith and some biographies, though Kecia Ali labels these attempts as "revisionist".^[14]

Not enough narrators

This claim objects that there is only one narrator, Hisham b. 'Urwa (from his father 'Urwa b. al-Zubayr, Aisha's nephew), and that although it is a sahih (authentic hadith) he alone is not enough to consider the hadith reliable. Many of the chains of narration for these hadiths^[37] do not involve Hisham (for example, Sahih Muslim 8:3311^[38]). From a traditional Islamic perspective, there is no requirement for multiple narrations. Even a single sahih hadith is sufficient to establish Islamic laws and practices.

Shaykh Haddad responded to the claim that most of these narrations are reported only by Hisham as follows: "Try more than eleven authorities among the Tabi`in that reported it directly from `A'isha, not counting the other major Companions that reported the same, nor other major Successors that reported it from other than `A'isha."^[31]

As discussed above, since then modern academic scholarship has cast serious doubt on these other transmissions, though traditional Islamic scholarship is in any case generally resistant towards modern academic hadith criticism. Details of some of these other chains of narration that do not include Hisham ibn 'Urwah ibn az-Zubayr can be found in the first half of an article by the IslamQA website.

Locality of narrations

A related claim is that Hisham's hadith is not narrated by Medinans, despite him living there for most of his life. Shaykh Haddad responds with examples of Medinans reporting the narration:

However, modern academic scholarship indicates that the early Medinan transmissions of the hadith specifying Aisha's marital age have fabricated isnads and derive from versions first circulated by Hisham after he moved to Iraq (though another relevant tradition seems to have been narrated earlier by the Medinan scholar al Zuhri - see discussion above).

Revelation time of surah al-Qamar

This arguments uses the Sahih Bukhari hadith in which Aisha explains she was a "playful girl" (jariyatun al-'abu لَجَارِيَةٌ أَلْعَبُ) when Surah (chapter) al-Qamar of the Quran was revealed.^[39] With the rough estimation that this chapter was revealed nine years before hijrah (c. 622) some conclude that this makes Aisha older than other hadiths claim.

However, the precise date of the revelation of Surah al-Qamar is unknown. Ibn Hajar, Maududi, and other traditionalists said it was revealed 5 years before Hijrah (BH).^[40] Zahid Aziz said it was revealed before 6 BH.^[41] Alternatively there is no reputable source that claims this chapter came about 9 BH.

Shaykh Haddad confirms this as he argues that the traditional estimate of the revelation of Surah al-Qamar is consistent with Aisha’s age being nine years.

Battle of Badr and Uhud

This apologetic argument aims to make the claim that Aisha was at the Battles of Badr and Uhud, and that since standard practice at the time disallowed anyone under 15 from joining the battlefield, she could not have been younger than this.

However, there are no sources that can be found mentioning Aisha's participation in the Battle of Badr. A few hadiths highlight Aisha's involvement in the Battle of Uhud, but only to the extent that she was not involved in the battlefield and merely carrying water skins to the combatants.^[42] Women and young children were allowed to perform such functions during battles.^[43]

Shaykh Haddad responds to this apologetic argument:

Age of Asma

One da'if (weak) hadith narrated from al-Zinad and recorded in the works of some medieval scholars, including al-Dhahabi,^[44] states that Aisha's older sister Asma was ten years older than her. This has been combined with improbable information about Asma being 100 years old at the time of her death in 73 AH to calculate that Aisha was eighteen or nineteen at the time of her marriage consumation (1 AH or 2 AH - (73 - 100) - 10).

Shaykh Haddad and the IslamQA website both independently criticise this approach as relying on a single narrator, who most scholars regard as weak, and note that a hadith by a more reliable chain from the same narrator gives a broader range for the age difference between the sisters.^[31][45] Both also note that al-Dhahabi too gave the vaguer opinion that Asma was "ten or more" years older than Aisha.

Tabari's account of Abu Bakr's children and wives

This account uses al-Tabari's exegesis to argue that Aisha was born in the pre-islamic period, and thus could not have been less than 14 tears old.^[46]

However, al-Tabari's own account reports at least five times that Aisha was around 6-7 years old during marriage and the marriage was consummated 3 years later.^{[47][48][49][50][51]}

Furthermore, Shaykh Gibril Haddad says that the initial passage mentioned is misinterpreted, stating "Al-Tabari nowhere reports that 'Abu Bakr's four children were all born in Jahiliyya' but only that Abu Bakr married both their mothers in Jahiliyya, Qutayla bint Sa`d and Umm Ruman, who bore him four children in all, two each, `A'isha being the daughter of Umm Ruman."^[31]

Time of Umar's conversion to Islam

This argument draws on al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah (Biography of the Prophet) to claim that since Ayesha converted to Islam before Umar she could not have been born during the first year of Islam.^[52]

However, even if the claim Aisha converted to Islam before Umar were true, it does not mean this took place during the first year of Islam, since Umar converted in 617 AD, about 4 years after Aisha’s birth in 613 AD.^[1] Furthermore Aisha never accounted converting to islam as hadiths show she never remembered a time before when her family wasn't Muslim.^[53]

Besides disputing the claim that Ibn Hisham reported that Aisha accepted Islam quite some time before `umar ibn al-Khattab, Shaykh Haddad also casts doubt on the claim stating:

Tabari's account of Abu Bakr's migration to Habshah

This argument claims that al-Tabari states that when Abu Bakr was planning to migrate to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), he spoke to Mut`am, with whose son, Jabayr, Aisha was engaged. This migration occured eight years before hijrah, at which time Aisha had only just been born if she consumated her marriage to Muhammad at the age of 9 or 10.

Proponents of this claim admit they have no primary source, which originated in Kandhalvi's Urdu booklet.^[30] Shayk Haddad responds that "there is no mention of emigration in Tabari's account of Abu Bakr's discussion with Mut`im" and "there had been only some preliminary talk, not a formal arrangement".^[31]

The meaning of bikr

This argument cites a hadith in Ibn Hanbal's Musnad saying that Khaulah suggested Aisha to Muhammad as a virgin (bikr) he could marry. The claim is that bikr would not be used for a young girl.^[54]

However, there are multiple sahih hadith narrations of a highly relevant conversation between Muhammad and Jabir in which bikr (virgin) is clearly compatible with jariyah (young girl).

Shaykh Haddad says regarding the claim, "This is ignorant nonsense, bikr means a virgin girl, a girl who has never been married even if her age is 0 and there is no unclarity here whatsoever.".^[31]

Fatima's age difference

This claim is that according to ibn Hajar, Fatima was five years older than Aisha and Muhammad was 35 years old when Fatima was born. Therefore, based on this claim, Aisha must have been a teenager at the time her marriage was consummated.

However, the proponent of this claim^[30] has combined and selectively quoted conflicting sources. Shaykh Haddad responds:

Hadith saying Aisha had reached puberty

This argument is based on a mistranslated hadith, Sahih Bukhari 1:8:465, which in one English translation states that Aisha had seen her parents follow islam since the age of puberty, and not a day passed by without Muhammad visiting them.

However, the word أَعْقِلْ means thoughts or reasoning, but the translator, Muhsin Khan, has used the word 'puberty'. The meaning rather is simply that 'Aisha was aware that her parents were following Islam. A literal translation would be "I was not aware of my parents other than that the two of them both acknowledged the religion". The exact same Arabic phrase is translated correctly by the same translator in another narration of the same hadith.^[55]

Hadith in which Aisha mensturated

This argument is also based off a mistranslated hadith, Sunan Abu Dawud 4915 (Ahmad Hasan numbering; 4933 Dar-us-Salam).

Ahmad Hasan mistranslates Abu Dawud's comment as "That is to say: I menstruated". Aisha's phrase "I burst into laughter" is fa-qultu heeh heeh (فَقُلْتُ هِيهْ هِيهْ), "And I said heh, heh". The Dar-us-Salam English-Arabic edition of Sunan Abu Dawud translated by Nasiruddin al-Khattab (Hadith 4933) renders Aisha's words here: "She made me stand at the door and I started to breathe deeply" (Dar-us-Salam do not include Abu Dawud's comment).

Abu Dawud's comment is ay tanaffasat (أَىْ تَنَفَّسَتْ), which is "That is to say 'I breathed'". The verb nun-fa-sin is used here in Arabic form V with the ta prefix and shadda (doubled) middle letter, which Lane's Lexicon says means "breathed". Form I can mean menstruated, but that is not the form used in the hadith.^[56]

Aisha remembered the migration setting out to Abyssinia

Another hadith has been commonly misinterpreted in order to claim that Aisha remembered Muhammad coming to Abu Bakr when it was time to migrate to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia). This forced migration occurred due to what Urwa b. Zubayr in his first letter describes as the first persecution (al-fitnah al-ūlā) in Mecca, before the migration some years later to Medina.

The hadith itself does not state which migration it relates too.

Another hadith shows clearly that the above hadith actually refers to the migration to Medina, not Abyssinia. Notice the similar phrasing about Muhammad coming to Abu Bakr at noon after being granted permission to migrate, the two she-camels which Abu Bakr had prepared and the general setting. At the end of the quote Medina is mentioned.

Apologetic justifications for the marriage

A number of claims are commonly made in Muhammad's defence by those who accept the traditional account that he married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine, Muhammad at that time being a fifty-three year old man. These claims are widely criticised both by Muslims who reject the authenticity of the relevant hadiths, as well as by many other people, whatever their stance on the historicity of the story.

Cultural norms at the time

It does seem that it was common to contract daughters in marriage at an early age in Arab culture at that time. Imam Malik (d. 795 CE) based his rulings on the community practice in Medina. He permitted a father to contract his virgin minor daughter into a marriage and without her permission. Early jurists of other legal schools (who also agreed on this) used narrations about Muhammad's companions (or Muhammad himself) marrying or entering minors into marriage contracts as evidence in their legal discussions, and all more or less agreed that consummation of such marriages was allowed once a girl had reached the age of majority, or in some opinions, earlier if it was judged that she could physically tolerate intercourse (see Child Marriage in Islamic Law).

Some argue that critics of Muhammad's actions in the traditional account commit the fallacy of presentism in which moral standards of an earlier age when circumstances were different are judged by those of today, and further argue that very early marriage and consummation were common at the time.

However, critics note that unlike in the early Islamic polity, the minimum age of marriage or consummation for girls in the neighbouring Byzantine and Sasanid empires was significantly later at 13 or 12, albeit still very young (see above). Further, they argue that it is objectively the case that adolescent pregnancy brings signicantly greater risk of serious medical complications for both the mother and baby as noted for example by The World Health Organization) and that this would be no different a thousand years ago, especially in the case of a nine year old girl. Moreover, critics question whether it is legitimate to complain of presentism, given the Islamic concept of Muhammad as al-Insān al-Kāmil (the perfect human) and Uswa Hasana (an excellent model of conduct). Indeed, Muhammad's marriage to Aisha has been cited by Islamic scholars opposed to the introduction or raising of the minimum age of marriage which has occurred in most Muslim majority countries in recent decades.

Shorter life expectancy

Some argue that life expectancy a millenium ago was considerably lower than today, so there was an imperative to start a family at a young age. Critics note that such claims are often exaggerated for these purposes by including infant mortality in the calculation of average lifespans. A study of skeletal remains from the Mexican city of Cholula showed that between 900 to 1500 CE, most people who made it to adulthood went on to live beyond the age of fifty. Another study showed that in medieval England those who reached the age of 25 had an average life expectancy of another 25 years.^[57] Both Muhammad and Aisha died in their sixties. Furthermore, critics point out that the risk of maternal and infant mortality was relatively high among girls enduring pregnancy in early adolesence (traditionally, Muhammad commenced intercourse with Aisha when she was nine), while in other cases permanent reproductive damage can be done. Aisha did not bear Muhammad any children.

Earlier puberty and menarchy in the past

Another common argument is that puberty occured earlier in the past or in hot climates. Puberty is a process which takes place over a number of years, while menarchy (first menstruation) is a distinct physiologial event which is the culmination of the anatomical processes of puberty. Apologetic websites typically cite books or articles which mention that the onset of puberty can occur today from as early as the age of eight. An article by Jesse Gamble is commonly quoted for saying that "Menarche affected Paleolithic girls between the ages of 7 to 13".^[58] A journal article by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson gives a similar range and is commonly cited for their argument that in the simpler societies of the past, psycho-social maturity was better aligned with the age of physical development.^[59]

However, critics have noticed that this is only half the story. The opening sentence of Gluckman and Hanson's paper begins by saying, "The age of menarchy has fallen as child health has improved". The paper explains that menarchy begins later when childhood health and nutrition is poor, such as in the neolithic period, when as a result of "settlement, childhood disease and postnatal undernutrition became common and therefore the average age of menarchy was delayed" in contrast to the paleolithic hunter-gatherers. In Figure 2 of their paper the authors indicate the likely age ranges of menarchy 20,000 years ago (c. 7-14 years old), 2,000 years ago (c. 10-17 years old), 200 years ago during the industrial revolution (c. 13-18 years old) and today, when it has fallen back down (c. 9-15 years old). The authors argue that "With modern hygiene, nutrition and medicine, these pathological constraints on puberty have been removed and the age of menarchy has fallen to its evolutionarily determined range. But now the complexity of society has increased enormously and psychosocial maturation takes longer." Hadiths narrated by Aisha suggest that her mother struggled to make her gain weight before sending her to live with Muhammad (see Sunan Ibn Majah 4:29:3324 and Sunan Abu Dawud 28:3894).

The average age of menarchy today in Europe and the United States has fallen to around 13 years old, while the average is about 14 years old in Yemen in the south of the Arabian Peninsula (coming down from 14.44 years old in 1979 to 13.8 in 2013, standard deviation of 1.36 years). The average age is very similar (13-14) across a large range of low and middle income countries.^[60]

See Also

• Child Marriage in Islamic Law
• She's too young (Fatima)

Translations

• A version of this page is also available in the following languages: Czech. For additional languages, see the sidebar on the left.

External Links

• Shaykh Gibril Haddad - Biography of Shaykh Gibril Fouad Haddad at SunniPath, The online Islamic Academy
• Responses to "The Learner" (Moiz Amjad) and others - Collection of Answering Islam articles
• Was Aisha really only nine - Article by Tara MacArthur

Acknowledgments

References