Aisha's Age: Difference between revisions

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'''Aisha''' (''‘Ā’ishah'', c. 613/614 –c. 678)<ref name="Siddiqui">Al-Nasa'i 1997, p. 108</ref> 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 numerous [[sahih]] [[Hadith|hadiths]].<ref>Narrated Hisham's father:

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.<ref name=":3">Ali, Kecia. ''Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence''. OneWorld. p. 173-186. <nowiki>ISBN 978-1780743813</nowiki>.</ref> All biographical information on Muhammad and his companions was first recorded over a century after his death,<ref>Kadri, Sadakat (2012). ''Heaven on Earth''. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. p. 30.</ref> but the hadith and scripture 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.<ref>When the Prophet married Aisha she very young and not yet ready for consummation.

===Doubts raised by modern analytical methods===

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.

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 Caroline 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.<ref>Baugh writes: "Although it is not impossible that Malik would have accepted the content of the report given early practice, Malik is one of many jurists who did not rely on the text, which does not in fact occur in any of the early books of jurisprudence except for that of al-Shafi'i and, shortly after him, 'Abd al Razzaq's Musannaf. Even later jurists such as Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim shy away from it, although it is used by Ibn Qudama before them. Presuming its authenticity (it occurs in Bukhari and Muslim), questions occur such as, was 'A'isha in fact compelled against her will? Can we assume that Abu Bakr did not consult her? Had she, at age nine, entered her majority or was she still prepubescent?"<BR />Carolyn Baugh, ''Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law'', Leiden: Brill, 2017, p. 43 footnote 101</ref> Indeed, it does not seem to be of any use for the areas of juristic disagreement or the points which they felt a need to prove, which are described in the article [[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, nor even whether she had reached puberty at nine.

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 during Shawwal in the tenth year after the prophethood, three years before the migration. He arranged the marriage feast (i.e. for consummation) in Shawwal, eight months after the migration. 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.<ref>See 1 hour 38 minutes - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s Why the Aisha Marital Age Hadith is a FORGERY: An EXCLUSIVE Lecture by Dr. Joshua Little] - youtube.com, 26 February 2023<BR />One presumably later version quoted from al-Tabari in another footnote below adds that Aisha was nine</ref> 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 very young.

As discussed above, modern academic scholarship has cast serious doubt on these other narrations as discussed above, though traditional Islamic scholarship is 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 [https://islamqa.info/en/124483 article by the IslamQA] website.

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

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 (13-18 years old) and today, when it has fallen back down (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 {{Ibn Majah||4|29|3324}} and {{Abu Dawud|28|3894}}).