I have seen Muslim dating sites urging people to get married early based on Aisha’s young age of marriage. I can’t find any right now.
I don’t have to prove any of this in order to discuss the OP though. If you spend a little time digging you will find it is true, or we could open another thread.
More like this: saying something that bigots say, that’s been repeatedly debunked, in an “I’m concerned about what I’ve learned” tone of voice, doesn’t make it any less bigoted, or debunked.
You can have gone to whatever you wish, but if you failed to learn anything, you still need to study more.
True. You said that Muslims were harmed by the Hadiths rather than Islam being harmed. My analogy stands and you have still failed to acknowledge that the Hadiths are not held in high esteem by all Muslims.
So? As pointed out in this article, the Hadiths attributed to that gentleman actually contradict each other in regards to Aisha.
Whoopee! Of course, when the accusations of rape are simply one more libel by haters of that group, it tends to lessen the power of those accusations.
It was not provided for you. It was offered to other readers who had not already made up their minds from reading tripe from thereligionofperace.com
Beyond that, I notice that you have failed to provide any evidence that the issue of “child brides” is a Muslim problem. Finding child brides among the tribes in Afghanistan or Yemen does not make it an issue of Islam unless you find the same problem in the cities of Iran and Iraq and Egypt or in Paris, Montreal, or Dearborn, MI. And since the problem of “child brides” is also a serious one in the Hindu back country of India, it would appear to be much more of a cultural issue then a religious one. Blaming Islam for a situation that does not occur throughout Islam but does occur in other places is a pretty clear indication that one is simply looking for reasons to bash Islam and is not really interested in the problem of forcing young girls into marriage.
This is similar to the horror of Female Genital Mutilation that some people pretend is a “Muslim” problem when it is actually a practice that occurs among Muslims and Animists and Christians.
I am guessing that you tried to link to this story:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huC9UMsuDGHS6MPZcDO2C0Q7Oqkw
in which it is pointed out that a Saudi Muslim cleric condemned the marriage of a young girl after protests, with a sidebar that notes that in Saudi Arabia, considered a backward country by most Muslims, there are still some judges pointing to the Aisha story. So we are still looking at you condemning an entire religion for the actions of a limited number of people who are considered backwards by their fellow worshippers.
Posted this back in 2002:
All the above being said, this for the most part has nothing to do with nothing. We actually don’t know what Muhammad did or didn’t do - I don’t absolutely fully trust any classical or medieval source, even multiple ones as often enough one manufactures a story for various reasons and everyone else “borrows” it. As noted the emphasis on A’isha’s young age might well have just been an attempt to emphasize her virginal purity in a period when her political importance ( post- Muhammad ) was extremely high. But if one accepts the above account Muhammad certainly doesn’t come off as a model of modern moral rectitude.
However can we draw many conclusions about Muhammad’s character or sexual predilections from this? Not really, at least not without stretching. It doesn’t seem to be part of a pattern, but rather an oddball exception with obvious political overtones. Even if the story is true we don’t know if he was porking her three times a night from age nine ( or ten or eleven, depending on the source ) until he died, or if they had a ceremonial consummation once and that was it or what. They certainly had no kids together and he died when she was purportedly ~18.
Can we draw any conclusions from Islam as a whole from this? Not really. There is no consistent age of majority in Islam, but at least generally puberty seems to be the norm - one of the commonest medieval numbers seems to have been 15, which actually fits in well with medieval Europe ( when the age of majority, though variable, was typically 14-15 for males, 12 for females ). On quick check modern ages of consent in most modern Muslim countries seem to hover around 16-18, same as the western world and higher in parts of the ME ( Somalia seems a notable exception with none - but then it is a non-functional shithole ).
Can certain Muslim wing-nuts use this tradition to try and justify child marriage and pedophilia. Well, yeah - they can and have. Which is why I said “for the most part” above. But religious wing-nuts can pull all sorts of unsavory things out of their asses - witness certain branches of Christianity in places like the U.S. and South Africa and their past justifications for racial discrimination.
Generally I think discussions like these are much ado about nothing, unless it is talking about specific instances of current abuses and how to address them. Otherwise it doesn’t amount to too much more than cocktail trivia.
It has been debunked?
So, you got nothin’.
Actually, you do have to prove it. If the problem of child brides occurs in many places outside Islam and if it does not occur throughout all or most Muslim lands, then your hypothesis that this belief (that you hold more dearly than most Muslims) is something that harms all Muslims is wrong and your desperate need to condemn Islam, (all the while coyly not joining a chorus of bigotry), is misguided.
I should not have even taken the bait and tried to argue against the charges of bigotry.I am interested in what happens in the Muslim world, let’s just leave it at that and discuss the OP. Unless you really want to get into my motivations, which are not pure. But that is more of a MPSIMS than a GD topic. Hint: Love not hate.
It is rather shocking to read for the first time that the “sinless” uber moral Jesus Christ equivalent in the major competing global religion to the familiar Christianity is a character on par with Warren Jeffs.
And there is no legitimate reason to pull shit out of the Tanakh in response. (Did anyone mention that Abraham married his sister?) It really has nothing to do with Christianity.
But all that Jewish stuff was written a thousand years before the Koran or the Hadiths, and these Islamic writings shows very little progress towards a “more” humane message since then. Mind you we are talking a period some 1400 years ago. On the other hand, the official gospels and the epistles written half a millenium before Islam can be recited today without raising any eyebrows. That is what most of us here are used to and expect from a religion.
The simple answer to your query is that no there is, despite Hank’s protestations, no consensus as to what age Aisha was when she and Muhammad married. You’ll notice even his wikipedia article can’t seem to decide whether she was born in 612(wherein she’d have been eleven when married) or 614(wherein she’d have been nine).
And for good reason. Hank is referring to some Hadiths which were specifically attributed to Aisha which do claim that she was betrothed at age six and the marriage was consummated at age nine.
What he fails to note is that the various Hadiths are hardly consistent as to what her age is.
For those not aware, Hadiths are collected sayings and stories about Muhammad and his companions, including Aisha that have been deemed “authentic”.
The problem of course is that most were collected years, decades, and even centuries after after the death of Muhammad. For example, Muahammad al-Bukhari, whom Hank refers to was born nearly two centuries after Muhammad first heard the call and his collection, Sahih al-Bukhari is considered just about the most reliable.
I’m sure you can immediately recognize the danger in thinking that anyone could judge with with any amount of confidence to be “authentic”. You can also imagine why many Muslim scholars debate over which ones are authentic which usually has little to do with how much evidence there is to their veracity as opposed to whether they find those hadiths to be appealing or not.
The fact that they’ve been collected by huge numbers of people after being passed along as an oral tradition doesn’t help.
As to Aisha’s age, the only ones that explicitly state her age at the time of marriage was nine, however there are countless others which, if they were true would have to mean she was anywhere from 12-19 at the time of her marriage.
Before going forward I should say that among the few facts for which there is not dispute is that Muhammad first “heard the call” in 610 CE/AD(meaning when Islam started) and that she and Muhammad were married in 624 CE.
For example in my first post on this thread I referred to traditions that all of Abu Bakr’s children were born prior to Muhammad “hearing the call”. Since Muhammad heard the call in 610 CE/AD and he and Aisha were married in 623 CE that would mean that she’d have had to be at least 13-14.
Additionally, she is reputed to be one of the first children and among the first 20 people “embrace Islam” which she couldn’t have been doing until she was at least walking and talking. Now according to Hank she was born in 614 CE which presumably would mean she couldn’t have “embraced Islam” until around 618 CE.
Again, this makes little sense unless she was born a few years before 610 which would have made her roughly 18-19 or older when married.
Aisha was also alleged to have taken part in the battle of Ehud which took place in 625 which they’d never have allowed her to take part in if she was only eleven though they’d have done so if she’d been fifteen or so.
Additionally, according to some hadiths Aisha’s sister Asma was ten years older than her younger sister and she was 27 during the Hijrah(Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina) 622 CE. Again, this would mean Aisha was around 18 when she was married.
Now, am I saying that Aisha was 18 or 19 when she married Muhammad. No, the truth is all we can do is make some educated guesses.
Now, she lived at a time when girls where thought to be women and to be marriageable as soon as the went through puberty and started menstruating.
Countless Muslim girls were married off at that age and Christians and Jews didn’t think differently.
St. Augustine married a twelve-year-old and according to Jewish tradition boys could get married at thirteen and girls at twelve.
Amongst the Byzantines the taking of child brides was quite common, as Tom’s link pointed to many English kings did the same.
Similarly, one should remember that in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was only twelve or thirteen(I can’t remember which).
The reason for this is not because they were pedophiles but because our concept of adolescence, the age between childhood and adulthood is a very modern concept and back then people thought you were an adult as soon as you went through puberty and it made perfect sense marry people off as quickly as possible and have as many kids as possible when it was common to have seven kids and have four to five die and when life expectancies were vastly shorter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she was only thirteen or fourteen or even twelve, but I seriously doubt we was nine because marrying girls that young, before they’d gone through puberty was extremely unusual.
Anyway, the hadiths are extremely inconsistent and like most dogmas the idea that any, much less most of them can be said with any confidence to be authentic doesn’t survive the slightest scratching below the surface.
I also suspect most people can gather why the question of Aisha is a question that non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims can defend Muhammad about vastly easier.
One final thing.
I’ve always found this line of attack on Muhammad quite weird since there are so many other lines of attack.
For example, he explicitly defended slavery, had slaves himself, and freely said that masters could have sex with their female slaves whenever they wanted.
Before anyone gets on their high horse about a guy in the sixth century nailing a nine year old, consider that in 1880 the age of consent in Delaware was 7.
Cite: Ages of consent in North America - Wikipedia
So, newsflash, people in previous centuries did shit that would really sicken a modern person. That’s why we shouldn’t follow their moral teachings or their musings on the origin of the universe.
More to the point, you should not have opened a thread that relies on one of the standard anti-Islamic screeds by declaring that you were not a bigot.
I don’t really care whether or not you are bigoted. I do care that your argument is fatally flawed on several levels and that you persistently avoid addressing those problems with your claims:[ul][li]You have dodged the issue that the very same author who supposedly quoted Aisha (a couple of centuries after the fact) about her marriage also made claims about her age that refuted those purported statements;[/li][li]You have failed to demonstrate what percent of Muslims know or care about the age at which Aisha married;[/li][li]You have refused to recognize that your claim regarding all Muslims is based on works that are explicitly ignored or even rejected by large numbers of Muslims, pretending that they have all been tainted by a book that many reject.[/li][/ul]
How about being a tad bit honest about your own posts, hey?
No, it’s not. You are pretending that both the Qur’an and all the Hadith are exactly the same. There are a few reasons why that is not the case. We’ll start with the simple fact that Muslims consider the Qur’an to be revealed to Muhammed. They do not consider the Hadith to be revelations. At least, none of the Muslims I’ve met nor any of the Islamic sites I’ve managed to encounter on the 'net do. Next, you’re also pretending that the Hadith are Muhammed’s words while at the very same time you are attributing those Hadith to others.
Oh, but you’re more than willing to label them as perfect revelation, not only on par with the Qur’an but actually as the word of God to Muslims when you just now indicate that you are aware Muslims do not, in fact, consider them so, aren’t you? After all, if you didn’t pretend that, your prejudice would have no ground and we can’t have groundless prejudice, huh?
I made no assumption. I responded to the evidence of my very own eyes and using my knowledge of the English language.
You, on the other hand, are assuming all kinds of stuff here.
Except, of course, yours. And there’s no doubt you’re bigoted against Islam. See below.
That would be the below to which I just referred.
Yeah, right. Well, I guess you may be correct in that you don’t know how to challenge it. After all, as noted by others here, all you’ve basically done is to crib one of the standard anti-Islamic screeds and pretended that you’re just concerned.
News flash: some of the folks who’ve garnered that freedom just so happen to have been Muslims.
Not all Muslims are stuck in an area where abandoning Islam is punishable by death. Oh, by the way, what’s your take on King David of Old Testament horny murdering fame and Paul of New Testament “You women should just shut up” fame?
Let’s cut to the chase, Hank. Stipulating that everything you’ve claimed is true–that Aisha was nine when Mohammed consummated their marriage, thus engaging in pedophilic rape of his child bride–what’s a Muslim to do? Leave Islam? Challenge it internally? Look for hadith that challenge this fact in order to deprive contemporary Muslim of an argument for child brides?
That’s nonsense. Rape is sex against someone’s will, regardless of what the law says or whether the law exists at all. Forced sex was rape before law or even people existed.
Well, not to nitpick or anything, but on that definition we cannot say that the consummation of the marriage of Muhammed and Aisha was rape, since we do not know that it was against her will.
You can take the view that a nine-year old (assuming she was nine) is incapable of forming an intention with regard to participating in sex, but on that view the act would have been done without her will, but not against it.
Is this an irrelevant nitpick? Well, not completely. “Statutory rape” is a term that gets used a lot in the US, and I presume in fact it is the technically correct legal term, but it doesn’t have the same traction outside the US, where the corresponding crime is something like “unlawful carnal knowledge”. The point here is that the US terminology imports a presumption that the victim opposes the act of sex, whereas the language used elsewhere proceeds on the basis taht the victim’s desire or intentions are irrelevant.
In other words, characterising the consummation of this marriage as “rape” imports a set of cultural presumptions and attitudes which are far from universal even today. Most or all societies would condemn sex with a nine-year old spouse; not all would characterise it as rape.
We may - just possibly - criticise people who lived centuries ago and in another world for not sharing the moral presumptions and understandings of our culture, but I don’t think we can draw any wider conclusions about that other that that they didn’t have our upbringing.
It is obvious that you have not looked into this issue and are upset about what you are seeing, but that does not make it untrue, or a screed. Aisha’s marriage and consummation at age nine is not a smear, it is Islamic history.
[QUOTE]
[ul][li]You have dodged the issue that the very same author who supposedly quoted Aisha (a couple of centuries after the fact) about her marriage also made claims about her age that refuted those purported statements;[/li][/QUOTE]
You don’t get it. Islam is the Koran and the Sunna, or way of Muhammad, and the Sunna is determined by by the various collections of Hadith, which have various levels of authenticity. The authenticity of the ones in question from Bukhari and Muslim are not an issue except to people trying to please Westerners.
Again, if you think that those Hadith have been rejected by someone with influence in the Muslim world, go ahead and post your proof.
Good question, I don’t know. I think if the taboo against apostasy was broken then maybe that would put pressure on influential people within to come up with justifications for deciding that some of the violent and misogynistic instructions.
It was Genesis 19:30; they were Lot’s daughters (the sames ones he offered to let an angry mob rape rather than turn over 2 strangers). They were afraid they were the only human beings left after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah so they got their father drunk and raped him; both becoming pregnant as a result.
Oh bull, I never said they were exactly the same.
No they do not but they are how the actions and sayings of the prophet are determined.
Some Hadith are Mohammed’s words, the ones in question are Aisha’s words.
They are not the word of God, the Koran is. The Koran commands Muslims to follow the Sunna, the way of the prophet. The Sunna is determined from the various collections of Hadith. These are sorted into various levels of authenticity. The ones in question are considered “Sahih”, the most authentic. I learned this from Muslims, not from a hate site.
I don’t have a prejudice towards Islam, I judge it based on evidence.
I am just listening to what Muslims themselves say. Do you think the yahoo in the video linked in the OP would be counseling fellow proselytizers to act proud of Aisha’s age if their was some theologically acceptable way around it?
Well you hate black people and women.
Logic fail. The total inability to rationally discuss something just because the subject has been used by bigots against Muslims is disappointing.
I know, sometimes Muslims do good things. Right so this relates to the OP how?