Huh? You said they’re the word of God to Muslims. What, God’s word isn’t God’s word to Muslims? How’s that work? Anyway, you’re mistaken. The Hadith are not considered to be the word of God.
WHAT? Where are you pulling this libel from?
The same place you got your false accusations against me.
I made no false accusations against you. You have now admitted to intentionally posting a false statement about me in this thread.
I said the Hadith are the word of God? I don’t think so. They are the sayings and habits of the prophet, as recorded by his companions. The Koran commands its followers to emulate Muhammad, to follow the Sunnah, which is determined by consulting various Hadith. The authenticity of the Hadith, for the most part, was determined long ago, by the people compiling the texts. Authentic Hadith are not rejected based on the findings of a Western academic or an article on a website. This authority lies with scholars in Islamic schools in, for example, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These scholars do not reject these Hadith.
Yes you called me a bigot with as much evidence as I have against you.
I’ll let the moderators deal with your dishonesty. Good riddance.
To complete my thought:…come up with justifications for deciding that some of the violent and misogynistic instructions were wrong all along or, I don’t know, inserted by Satan or the CIA with a time machine or something.
So is your position that according to Islamic history Aisha was born after Muhammad first “heard the call”, that she was not one of the first people to convert to Islam, that she did not participate in the battle of Uhud, and that she was not ten years younger than her sister Asma but more like 19 years younger than Asma.
You must hold this position if you think Aisha was only nine when when she married Muhammad. Please give me the names of some Muslim scholars who will back up your claim that the hadith which claims that all of Abu Bakr’s children were born prior to Muhammad hearing the call was fake.
Thanks
Bullshit.
Show me that the hadiths which stated that all of Abu Bakr’s children were unknown and undocumented prior to a few English-speaking Islamophobes accusing Muhammad of being a pedophile.
This is truly funny. You do realize that if you look through Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih al-Muslim you can find hadiths which claim that Aisha and Abu Bakr’s other children were born prior to Muhammad hearing the calling and other hadiths that would mean she was older than nine when they were married don’t you.
It is fairly easy to figure out these are true.
Go to YouTube and search “Aisha age” or something similar. Look up the speakers, scholars, Imams, ect on either side of the issue and compare their relative influence. You will find that those that claim that she was various older ages have very little.
It’s also worth noting that Harry Beecher is so incredibly lazy when it comes to his sources that in his first post on this thread he only cited two sources.
The first was a wikipedia article which claimed that Aisha was born in both 612 and that she was born in 614(how she was able to accomplish that I don’t know).
It’s also worth noting that the article at the very top notes that “this article needs additional cites for verification.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Age_at_marriage
The other is some youtube video featuring a young Muslim chav who doesn’t seem to be exactly a scholar.
Reasonable people can make three interpretations.
The first is that Harry doesn’t actually bother reading his cites.
The second is that he’s merely looking for cites that put Islam in a bad light and he doesn’t care if they’re inconsistent or not.
The third is that he does read his cites, realizes the wikipedia article he cites makes the contradictory claim that Aisha was eleven when she married Muhammad and that she was nine when she married Muhammad, but decides to go with nine because that just looks worse and that he desperately hopes no one actually checks his cites to see how little research he actually does and how little knowledge or understanding of the subject he has.
According to Shaykh Gibril Haddad Ibn Hisham lists A'isha among "those that accepted Islam because of Abu Bakr." This does not mean that she embraced Islam during the first year of Islam. Nor does it mean that she necessarily embraced Islam before Umar (year 6) although she was born the previous year (year 7 before the Hijra) although it is understood she will
automatically follow her father’s choice even before the age of reason.
(because she would not have been old enough)
First, the prohibition applied to combatants. It applied neither to
non-combatant boys nor to non-combatant girls and women. Second,
A'isha did not participate in Badr at all but bade farewell to the combatants as they were leaving Madina, as narrated by Muslim in his Sahih. On the day of Uhud (year 3), Anas, at the time only twelve or thirteen years old, reports seeing an eleven-year old A’isha and his mother Umm
Sulaym having tied up their dresses and carrying water skins back and forth to
the combatants, as narrated by al-Bukhari and Muslim.
Ibn Kathir based himself on Ibn Abi al-Zinad’s assertion that she
was ten years older than A'isha, however, al-Dhahabi in Siyar Alam
al-Nubala’ said there was a greater difference than 10 years between
the two, up to 19, and he is more reliable here.
Not fake, less reliable. Dr Zakir Naik
What I have shown you are quotes from Aisha in the Hadith in which she states her age. The fact that she states the age directly in these authenticated Hadith make them the authority on the matter of her age.
Because the other Hadith state her age directly in her own words they are taken as authoritative, from what I can tell.
Was anyone contesting this during the first 1200 years of Islam?
Attack the messenger all you want, it doesn’t make the message less true. I used nine instead of eleven because that is the traditionally accepted age. The cites to Bukhari and Muslim in the Wikipedia article alone prove point number two of the OP, unless you want to try to claim that those collections are not mainstream, traditional sources.
Who is the person with the most influence in the Muslim world, today or in the past, who contests Aisha’s age?
This is demonstrably false, as even a cursory examination into the nature of the hadiths will show.
Imam Bukhari was born in Iran in 810 CE, 178 years after the death of Muhammad. The Imam never met the Prophet, and whatever Bukhari did write down was filtered through nearly two centuries of word of mouth and/or (very likely) unattributable manuscripts. In short, they should hardly be considered a reliable recounting of the life and deeds of Muhammad.
Also demonstrably false.
If you’d actually done any real investigation into the nature and history of the hadiths, you’d find that the Sahih Bukhari is not universally accepted by all traditions within Islam; in fact, Shi’a (the second largest tradition in Islam, accounting for up to 20% of the religion’s followers) explicitly rejects it - as well as the five other hadiths used by Sunni Muslims - as a text for religious study.
Your demand to present Muslim scholars who contest Aisha’s age upon her marriage is a red herring because you can’t even prove that all Muslims accept that Muhammad took a child bride.
In short, your assertions in the OP are founded on complete ignorance, and presenting them as problematic facts (especially in this post-9/11 climate) reeks of bigotry.
Making assumptions about what I have or have not “looked into” is silly. I have even argued against the positions that you have accepted from sites such as thereligionofpeace.com as much as ten years ago on this very message board.
No. You don’t get it. Large numbers of Muslims do not accept the Hadith from Bukhari–every Shi’a Muslim, for example.
Beyond that, you have not presented any evidence that all Muslims believe the particular story that you are repeating or that all Muslims use that story to rationalize child brides. You have made the assertion, but the only examples that have been provided, (by me, not you), have been those in particular locations where the culture the predates Islam still holds sway.
Now. Let us see you provide actual evidence that your claim of universal acceptance is true.
Anyone in this thread who doesn’t believe some self proclaimed guru guy 1400 years ago had sex with the nine year old daughter of one of his followers because there is some confusion in the historical record about whether she was nine or 12 (or whatever the hell), but who believes in an entire religion because the same guy declared himself to be or to be related to some sort of supernatural being, is guilty of having the most extraordinarily variable gullet-size.
That is, they are choking on gnats and swallowing camels.
The idea that Muhammad was or was related to a supernatural being, (or indeed that there is such a thing) is so improbable that words fail. There is not documentary evidence on the entire planet sufficient to believe such a thing on any sensible basis, let alone a consistent one.
Contrastingly, the idea that a cult leader would talk his followers into letting him fuck their underage daughters is so utterly commonplace even today, that the only slightly surprising thing would be if he wasn’t doing so, the more so if the daughters weren’t even far from being of age by the mores of the time.
And lest anyone think this post is in support of the OP: OP, you take as your first premise something that is merely a modern moral position, and a modern legal fiction, about an arbitrary matter (the age of consent). You then pretend this arbitrary position is an “accepted truth” and therefore applicable 1400 years ago. This is a tactic of breathtaking ignorance, given the nature of change over time and the human experience.
Using the same dumb stunt you could condemn pretty much all the historical heroes of pretty much any society.
Shia use entirely different compilations, they do not reject those particular Hadith like in the revisionist arguments repeated in this thread. They are only about 20% of self described Muslims, andare not even considered Muslims by many other Muslims because they reject Hadith which are essential, core,** traditional and mainstream sources** to the majority of Muslims.
Isn’t that what we do? We are reminded that Thomas Jefferson was raping, or however you want to describe it, his slaves while founding our nation. It’s the bad that goes with the good. We don’t use him in totallity as a moral example of a perfect man. I agree with the rest of your post. The problem with Mo is not that he was necessarily worse than the average warlord from his time period, but that he was a man of his time who’s un-whitewashed persona is held as an example of ideal behavior to a 1/2 billion-billion folks.
Thanks** alpha**, I remember reading that in jr high when, in a burst of enthusiam, I set out to read the bible, and I was like :eek:
Are Scotsmen Islamic? Or just the ones who like sugar on their porridge? I get so confused…
As we speak, state legislators across the South and Midwest are drafting bills to block Wikipedia from all schools and government facilities in order to stem the Sharia tide.