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Aisha's Age: Difference between revisions
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==Modern academic views== | ==Modern academic views== | ||
===Provenance and dating of the marital age hadith=== | ===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.<ref>[https://islamicorigins.com/a-summary-of-my-phd-research/ A Summary of my PhD Research] by Joshua Little - Islamicorigins.com - 25 February 2023<BR />The PhD thesis itself will be linked on his blog</ref><ref>See also this lecture [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s | 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.<ref>[https://islamicorigins.com/a-summary-of-my-phd-research/ A Summary of my PhD Research] by Joshua Little - Islamicorigins.com - 25 February 2023<BR />The PhD thesis itself will be linked on his blog</ref><ref>See also this lecture by Dr. Joshua Little entitled [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s The Hadith of ʿAʾishah's Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory] - youtube.com, 26 February 2023</ref> 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.<ref>This is useful preparatory viewing for Dr Little's Aisha lecture: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4vMUUxhag Oxford Scholar Dr. Joshua Little Gives 21 REASONS Why Historians are SKEPTICAL of Hadith] - youtube.com February 2023</ref> | ||
After an extensive search for available | After an extensive search for available versions (200+) 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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
The massive amount of isnad fabrication entailed by any of the above conclusions casts doubt on traditional Islamic hadith science in general. For this reason modern academic historical-critical analysis of hadiths is regarded warily by traditionalists, while it is embraced by Islamic modernists. | |||
===Other considerations=== | ===Other considerations=== | ||
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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. | 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.<ref>See 1 hour 38 minutes | 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.<ref>See 1 hour 38 minutes in Dr. Joshua Little's lecture entitled [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s The Hadith of ʿAʾishah's Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory] - 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 a child at the time. | ||
==Apologetic history== | ==Apologetic history== | ||