I was actually thinking of making a no-judgement, open Ask Muslims thread on the new !islam community we have, so I was anticipating questions like this, don't worry. So long as they are in good faith, which this seems to be. In the interest of not derailing this thread I'll keep it short. Also realize I am not an authority in Islam - no one but God is, which is why Islam traditionally has no clergy.
The usual tack you will see is the cultural relativist one, that it was not seen as unusual at the time. We're talking about a very different cultural context where marriages were of political expedience and could spell the life or death of a movement or even an entire community, where before the Prophet women were reduced to basically objects. The subsistence strategy was different, it was a survival-based society, to the point that people literally aged physically faster. However you have probably seen this a lot, so I will not belabor the point.
The more important point that I've rarely seen talk about - the hadith that talk about Aisha's age at the time of marriage are suspiciously the only few hadith that really describe specific ages, because at the time, people barely kept track of these things. They had calendars that learned elite kept track of somewhat, but the average person did not pay attention to age number, that's a modern concept that didn't apply back then. Instead, age of majority for women was based on menarche, and for men was usually based on completion of training since this was a warrior society.
Why is this important? Because almost every single hadith that describes Aisha's age at the time of marriage was narrated by Aisha herself, when she was a middle aged woman enraptured in a civil war where emphasizing herself as the Prophet's only virginal wife would legitimize her side. Not that I'm saying she was consciously actively lying, I don't think she was, but that she and many others probably didn't know her exact age, and she was guesstimating her menarche as young an age as possible to emphasize her point.
I was actually thinking of making a no-judgement, open Ask Muslims thread on the new !islam community we have, so I was anticipating questions like this, don't worry. So long as they are in good faith, which this seems to be. In the interest of not derailing this thread I'll keep it short. Also realize I am not an authority in Islam - no one but God is, which is why Islam traditionally has no clergy.
The usual tack you will see is the cultural relativist one, that it was not seen as unusual at the time. We're talking about a very different cultural context where marriages were of political expedience and could spell the life or death of a movement or even an entire community, where before the Prophet women were reduced to basically objects. The subsistence strategy was different, it was a survival-based society, to the point that people literally aged physically faster. However you have probably seen this a lot, so I will not belabor the point.
The more important point that I've rarely seen talk about - the hadith that talk about Aisha's age at the time of marriage are suspiciously the only few hadith that really describe specific ages, because at the time, people barely kept track of these things. They had calendars that learned elite kept track of somewhat, but the average person did not pay attention to age number, that's a modern concept that didn't apply back then. Instead, age of majority for women was based on menarche, and for men was usually based on completion of training since this was a warrior society.
Why is this important? Because almost every single hadith that describes Aisha's age at the time of marriage was narrated by Aisha herself, when she was a middle aged woman enraptured in a civil war where emphasizing herself as the Prophet's only virginal wife would legitimize her side. Not that I'm saying she was consciously actively lying, I don't think she was, but that she and many others probably didn't know her exact age, and she was guesstimating her menarche as young an age as possible to emphasize her point.
deleted by creator