After Asr prayers, thousands of citizens and residents of Madinah wheel food carts into the Prophet's Mosque to serve iftar meals to millions of worshippers who gather in the sprawling prayer complex during Ramadan. (AN photo by Yousuf Muhammad)
Source: Dawn
Author: Nilofar Ahmad
IT is said that Hazrat Aisha was six years old when her nikah was performed with Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Makkah, and nine years old when she moved in to live with her husband in Madina after Hijra.
This piece of misinformation has led to the wrong view that child marriage has the sanction of Islam. It must be noted that establishing the authenticity of hadiths, the narrators’ circumstances and the conditions at that time have to be correlated with historical facts. There is only one hadith by Hisham which suggests the age of Hazrat Aisha as being nine when she came to live with her husband.
Chief Editor’s comments:
For additional information on this topic please see the comment section.
Categories: Asia, ISLAM, Islam: A Religion of Peace, Islamophobia
Additional readings on this issue:
http://islam4jesus.org/article/hadhrat-ayesha-a-loving-wife-of-the-1qhnnhcumbuyp-155/
Additionally, some useful info in the comments of this post:
http://theartofmisinformation.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/discussion-between-an-atheist-and-an-ahmadi-muslim/
Quoting from Dawn’s article by Nilofar Ahmad:
Excellent article, bringing up many points that are not well known and that are completely lost to common sense. We know that is probably done on purpose to paint a negative picture of the Prophet (pbuh). But, scholars such as this should be highlighted.
Also, it should be suggested to alislam.org team to collect the various material on this issue on one web page, so that those researching this issue can go to one place and find links to all of these materials (the Muslim Sunrise piece from Dr. Zia, this article, etc.). You can do a search, but you find various items, and many with conflicting accounts and information. Not everything will be in 100% agreement as there is not a definitive answer to this question, but one place where all the “reliable” material is located and listed would help people doing research on this (and other) subjects.
In any case, good article with many good points raised in support of the more plausible age of our Ummul Momineen. I find the one point of “tis’a ashara” (19) being mistaken and wrongly conveyed later as just “tis’a” (9) to be a very easy to understand mistake of an old man, whose sayings at that age are already widely discounted due to inconsistencies.
Great piece for those of us who have had to answer this question a number of times in professional and academic environments.
Thank you dear Jalal for making these suggestions.
There is another way to approach this issue by realizing the following:
Any time there is a useful discussion with a Christian group, as we explain the beauty of Islam, and as it begins to make some difference, someone among them is going to sabotage the serious discussion by moving the issue from the fundamentals like Monotheism, prophet hood, salvation and atonement to the age of Hadhrat Ayesha at the time of marriage. This is the best that the Christians can do to sustain their irrational dogma in face of Islam.
According to Karen Armstrong, an Ex Catholic nun, “Mahound’s fictional status in the West has perhaps made it even more difficult for people to see him as an historical character who deserves the same serious treatment as Napoleon, or Alexander the Great. The fictional portrait of Mahound in The Satanic Verses resonates deeply with these established Western fantasies.”
At another place she writes, “If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.”
To fully understand the background please read the second chapter of her first biography of the Holy Prophet Muhammad titled, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. The chapter is titled Muhammad the Enemy.
I once read something about Hadhrat Aisha (ra) being betrothed to someone before she was eventually betrothed and married to the Holy Prophet (saw), but that the first engagement was broken off (I think) because Abu Bakr had accepted Islam. Can anyone corroborate this? But regardless of the reason, if Aisha was engaged to a pagan Meccan before being engaged to the Holy Prophet (saw) it would have had to have taken place before Abu Bakr accepted Islam because he would not have betrothed his daughter to a disbeliever once he became Muslim. So that would logically corroborate that Aisha (whatever her age at her first betrothal) was definitely born before the advent of Islam in 610 AD.