According to this perspective, Aisha may have been young, but she was not younger than was the norm at the time. Other Muslims doubt the very idea that Aisha was six at the time of marriage, referring to historians who have questioned the reliability of Aisha's age as given in the saying.
In a society without a birth registry and where people did not celebrate birthdays, most people estimated their own age and that of others. Aisha would have been no different. What's more, Aisha had already been engaged to someone else before she married Muhammad, suggesting she had already been mature enough by the standards of her society to consider marriage for a while. It seems difficult to reconcile this with her being six. In addition, some modern Muslim scholars have more recently cast doubt on the veracity of the saying, or hadith, used to assert Aisha's young age.
In Islam, the hadith literature sayings of the prophet is considered secondary to the Qur'an. While the Qur'an is considered to be the verbatim word of God, the hadiths were transmitted over time through a rigorous but not infallible methodology. Taking all known accounts and records of Aisha's age at marriage, estimates of her age range from nine to Because of this, it is impossible to know with any certainty how old Aisha was.
What we do know is what the Qur'an says about marriage: that it is valid only between consenting adults, and that a woman has the right to choose her own spouse.
This shows that Aisha must have been approaching majority at the time. This shows that Aisha must have been about ten years at the time of her betrothal to the Prophet, and not six years as she is generally supposed to be. This is further borne out by the fact that Aisha herself is reported to have stated that when the chapter [of the Holy Quran] entitled The Moon, the fifty-fourth chapter, was revealed, she was a girl playing about and remembered certain verses then revealed.
Now the fifty-fourth chapter was undoubtedly revealed before the sixth year of the Call. All these considerations point to but one conclusion, viz. And there is one report in the Tabaqat that Aisha was nine years of age at the time of nikah. Again it is a fact admitted on all hands that the nikah of Aisha took place in the tenth year of the Call in the month of Shawwal, while there is also preponderance of evidence as to the consummation of her marriage taking place in the second year of Hijra in the same month, which shows that full five years had elapsed between the nikah and the consummation.
Hence there is not the least doubt that Aisha was at least nine or ten years of age at the time of betrothal, and fourteen or fifteen years at the time of marriage.
To facilitate understanding dates of these events, please note that it was in the tenth year of the Call, i. The hijra or emigration of the Holy Prophet to Madina took place three years later, and Aisha came to the household of the Holy Prophet in the second year after hijra. So if Aisha was born in the year of the Call, she would be ten years old at the time of the nikah and fifteen years old at the time of the consummation of the marriage.
Research subsequent to the time of Maulana Muhammad Ali has shown that she was older than this. These four were born before Islam. The compiler of the famous Hadith collection Mishkat al-Masabih, Imam Wali-ud-Din Muhammad ibn Abdullah Al-Khatib, who died years ago, has also written brief biographical notes on the narrators of Hadith reports. He writes under Asma, the older daughter of Abu Bakr:.
In 73 A. Asma died at the age of one hundred years. Go here to see an image of the full entry in Urdu. This would make Asma 28 years of age in 1 A. So Aisha would be 19 years old at the time of the consummation of her marriage, and 14 or 15 years old at the time of her nikah. It would place her year of birth at four or five years before the Call. The same statement is made by the famous classical commentator of the Holy Quran, Ibn Kathir, in his book Al-bidayya wal-nihaya:.
She was ten years older than her sister Aisha. Apart from these three evidences, which are presented in the Urdu pamphlet referred to above, we also note that the birth of Aisha being a little before the Call is consistent with the opening words of a statement by her which is recorded four times in Bukhari.
Those words are as follows:. This is tantamount to saying that she was born sometime before her parents accepted Islam but she can only remember them practising Islam. No doubt she and her parents knew well whether she was born before or after they accepted Islam, as their acceptance of Islam was such a landmark event in their life which took place just after the Holy Prophet received his mission from God. If she had been born after they accepted Islam it would make no sense for her to say that she always remembered them as following Islam.
Only if she was born before they accepted Islam, would it make sense for her to say that she can only remember them being Muslims, as she was too young to remember things before their conversion.
Secondly, the age of Hazrat Aisha can be easily calculated from the age of her elder sister Hazrat Asma who was 10 years older than Hazrat Aisha. Waliuddin Muhammad Abdullah Al-Khateeb al Amri Tabrizi the famous author of Mishkath , in his biography of narrators Asma ur Rijal , writes that Hazrat Asma died in the year 73 Hijri at the age of , ten or twelve days after the martyrdom of her son Abdullah Ibn Zubair. This puts the age of Hazrat Aisha at 17 during the same period. As all biographers of the Prophet agree that he consummated his marriage with Hazrat Aisha in the year 2 Hijri it can be conclusively said that she was 19 at that time and not nine as alleged in the aforementioned hadiths.
The Saudi judge also abused another hadith when he ruled that the minor girl shall have the right to seek a divorce only after reaching puberty. According to that, the Prophet is supposed to have given a minor girl the option to repudiate her marriage when she informed him that her father had married her off against her will. But a reading of this hadith shows that the girl in question was not a minor because the word used to describe her is bikran , which means a grown-up, unmarried girl.
Also, there is no mention of puberty in the report. Therefore, the concept of Khiyar-al Buloogh is bad in law as it is based on a false premise. In short, there is no authentic statement of the Prophet justifying child marriage and hence, the question of his advising any minor to wait until puberty to exercise her right to divorce simply does not arise.
The problem with the present day Islamic law is that most of it is not based on the spirit of the Quran. Some scholars think that Hazrat Aisha was married off so early because in Arabia girls mature at an early age. But this was not a common custom of the Arabs at that time.
According to Allama Kandhulvi, there is no such case on record either before or after Islam. Neither has this ever been promoted as a Sunnah of the Prophet. The Prophet married off his daughters Fatima at 21 and Ruquiyya at Hazrat Aisha narrates that she was present on the battlefield at the Battle of Badar Muslim.
But a nine-year-old could not have been taken on a rough and risky military mission. H, the Prophet refused to take boys of less than 15 years of age to the battle of Uhud. Would he have allowed a year-old girl to accompany him? But Anas reported that he saw Aisha and Umme Sulaim carrying goatskins full of water and serving it to the soldiers Bukhari.
Umme Sulaim and Umme Ammara, the other women present at Uhud, were both strong, mature women whose duties were the lifting of the dead and injured, treating their wounds, carrying water in heavy goatskins, supplying ammunition and even taking up the sword.
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