Aisha's Age: Difference between revisions

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 a few versions with additional details. Hisham attributed all of these to his father 'Urwa b. Zubayr (falsely, argues Little, though it is worth mentioning that in his thesis he does not notice that the content of 'Urwa's letter about Aisha reported by Hisham is also narrated by a Syrian partial common link who ascribed it via his uncle to 'Urwa's student, al-Zuhri, who moved from Medina to Syria.<ref>'Urwa wrote a number of letters on early Islamic history to the late Umayyad court. These letters were transmitted by his son Hisham and the traditions therein were often also transmitted by 'Urwa's Medinan student al-Zuhri. 'Urwa's letters are translated in full in Sean Anthony, ''Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The making of the Prophet of Islam'', Oakland CA: University of California, 2020, Chapter 4. In 2012, the creators of the ICMA method, Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki and Gregor Schoeler, strongly argued that the traditions in the letters attributed to 'Urwa probably do in some way originate with him, especially when they are supported by parallel traditions going back to 'Urwa (Goerke, A, Motzki, H & Schoeler, G (2012) [https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12692843/First_Century_Sources_for_the_Life_of_Muhammad_a_debate.pdf First-Century Sources for the Life of Muhammad?] A Debate, Der Islam, vol. 89, no. 2, pp. 2-59. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2012-0002).<BR />

However, Dr Little did not notice that another hadith he discusses which is ascribed to 'Urwa's Medinan student al-Zuhri contains the same core tradition as this letter, especially the distinctive sequence of elements but also much of the same or similar wording, albeit not in the form of a letter. Compare the Arabic provided in the isnad diagrams on his blog, or the transliteration of 'Urwa's reconstructed letter on pp. 310-11 of the thesis with al-Hajjaj b. Abi Mani's reconstructed transmission of the same elemental sequence (pp. 204-5, 370-72; see also 482). Al-Hajjaj who lived in Aleppo, Syria, ascribed it via his uncle to al-Zuhri, who does not himself count as a common link but did move from Medina to Damascus and later Resafa, Syria, where he tutored Hisham's sons. Part of the letter content and wording also comprise ʾAbū ʾUsāmah Ḥammād's narration from Hisham (pp. 223-4).</ref>). There is some evidence that Hisham did not originally extend the isnad of most of his versions back to Aisha herself, but rather only to his father 'Urwa, Aisha's nephew, and that they were narrated in the 3rd person, not in her own voice.<ref>Ibid. p. 305 including footnote 996</ref> It is even clearer that such isnad "raising" occured for transmissions by others back to Aisha by other routes.

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, which must have been transmitted while he was in Medina, 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 />For detailed discussion see pp. 373-74, 378-82, 460-61 of Dr Little's thesis.</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.

The majority of Islamic 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.<ref>Hashmi, Tariq Mahmood (2 April 2015). [http://www.al-mawrid.org/index.php/questions/view/role-importance-and-authenticity-of-the-hadith "Role, Importance And Authenticity Of The Hadith"]. ''Mawrid.org''. Retrieved 28 March 2018.</ref> The first recorded objection raised to Aisha's age was by Maulana Muhammad Ali who lived from 1874 to 1951.<ref name="Zahid Aziz" /> 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.<ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8711026.stm Who are the Ahmadi? - BBC News]</ref>  

Deriving arguments from both Habib Ur Rahman and Muhammad Ali, [[Gibril Haddad|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.<ref name="Amjad">See: "[http://www.islamawareness.net/FAQ/what_was_ayesha.html What was Ayesha's (ra) Age at the Time of Her Marriage?]", by Moiz Amjad.</ref> 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.

===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<ref>[[Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Aisha#Aisha.27s Age at Consummation and Marriage|Quran, Hadith, and Scholars on Aisha's Age at Consummation and Marriage]]</ref> do not involve Hisham (for example, Sahih Muslim 8:3311<ref>'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah's Apostle (ﷺ) married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he (the Holy Prophet) died she was eighteen years old.<br>{{Muslim|8|3311}}</ref>). 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."<ref name="Haddad" />

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 [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. 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).

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.<ref>Narrated Yusuf bin Mahik:

One [[Sahih#Da'if|da'if]] (weak) hadith narrated from al-Zinad and recorded in the works of some medieval scholars, including al-Dhahabi,<ref>al-Dhahabi. "Siyar a`lam al-nubala'". IslamWeb. Retrieved 3 September 2018. <q>قال عبد الرحمن بن أبي الزناد : كانت أسماء أكبر من عائشة بعشر" (Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi al-Zunad said: Asma was older than Aisha by ten years.)</q></ref> 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).

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.