L'age d'Aicha: Difference between revisions

Al-Tabari, Vol. 7, pp. 6-7</ref>

==A propos du mariage des enfants==

{{Main|Child Marriage in Islamic Law}}

===Provenance et datation du hadith sur l'âge du mariage===

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>Joshua Little (2022) ''The Hadith of ʿAʾishah's Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory'', PhD thesis, Oxford University

It is available on his blog together with very useful diagrams of the reported isnads and matns: [https://islamicorigins.com/the-unabridged-version-of-my-phd-thesis/ The Unabridged Version of My PhD Thesis]  by Joshua Little - Islamicorigins.com - 7 March 2023

See alternatively: [https://islamicorigins.com/a-summary-of-my-phd-research/ A Summary of my PhD Research] by Joshua Little - Islamicorigins.com - 25 February 2023</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 ICMA, converging isnad bundles of a widely transmitted hadith are compared with clusters of variation in the matns to see how well they correlate with each other. Often, this leads to the identification of one or more ''common links''  i.e. the person from whom transmissions of a matn first start to branch out, even if the chain may continue back by a single strand before that person.<ref>See Chapter 1 of Dr Little's thesis for a detailed explanation.</ref> 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>

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. al-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).

One of 'Urwa's letters is a short one about Aisha's marriage. It was reported in a couple of chains through Hisham and is quoted in the Relevant Quotations section above. Little contests a couple of arguments for the general authenticity of 'Urwa's letters but without wider engagement with Goerke et al. He also questions how we can in any case identify which words or elements thereof Hisham accurately transmitted (p. 314).

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 the Caliph'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.

===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.<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?"

Carolyn Baugh, ''Minor Marriage in Early Islamic Law'', Leiden: Brill, 2017, p. 43 footnote 101

Similarly, on p. 62 she elaborates why the legal implications of the hadith are obscure.</ref> Maliki jurists in Medina and Hanafi jurists in Kufah did not seek to prove that a father could contract his virgin minor daughter in marriage, which was taken for granted.<ref>In Chapter 4 she details the proof-texts used by Maliki jurists; see p. 79 regarding Hanafi jurists.</ref> Rather, they discussed a father's right to ''compell'' her without consultation, and whether he still had this right when she was no longer a virgin or minor, whether she had a right to rescind later and so on. Indeed, unlike various reports about companions used by Maliki scholars and highlighted by Baugh, 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 make use of the Aisha marital age hadith (and more generally pioneered the Quran and sound hadith corpus as the decisive sources of law). He used the Aisha hadith for purposes of proving a father's right to marry off his daughter regardless of her wishes, though he had to read in his own assumptions to do so (see [[Forced Marriage]])<ref>See also the quotes in Dr Little's thesis, pp. 454-5, where Shafi'i can be seen using the hadith in an attempt to prove the right of paternal compulsion.</ref>. Subsequent scholars followed Shafi'i in this usage. However, the Aisha hadith merely states that her marriage was contracted when she was six (or seven), and it does not specify whether she was consulted or forced by her father, 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, 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 consummation 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

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.

===Wider implications===