Aisha
Age at marriage and consummation

Islamic sources of the classical era list Aisha's age at the time of her marriage as six or seven and nine or ten at its consummation. In a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari, Aisha recollects having been married at six years of age. Ibn Sa'd 's biography holds her age at the time of marriage as between six and seven, and gives her age at consummation to be nine while Ibn Hisham 's biography of Muhammad suggests she may have been ten years old at consummation. Al-Tabari notes Aisha to have stayed with her parents after the marriage and consummated the relationship at nine years of age since she was young and sexually immature at the time of marriage; however, elsewhere Tabari appears to suggest that she was born during the Jahiliyyah (before 610 CE), which would translate to an age of about twelve or more at marriage.

In Islamic literature, the young age of her marriage did not draw any significant discourse; nonetheless, Spellberg and Ali find the very mention of her age to be atypical of early Muslim biographers, and hypothesize a connotation to her virginity and, more than that, religious purity. Her age did not interest later Muslim scholars either, and went unremarked-upon even by medieval and early-modern Christian polemicists. Early Orientalist writers, even in their condescending approach towards Muhammad and Islam, were primarily concerned with Muhammad's embrace of polygamy and the ethics of marrying for political causes; the few who discussed Aisha's age chose to explain the age-gap by citing the contemporary understanding of the Orient as a hot place, that promulgated sexually deviant practices.

Beginning late nineteenth century, with the East and its alleged immoralities subject to increasing opprobrium, the colonizing powers sought to regulate the age of consent. As such efforts ran into conflicts with local forms of Sharia, Aisha's age at marriage — and the involved Prophetic precedent — became the predominant explanation in explaining the backwardness of Muslim societies and their reticence to reforms. In response, some Muslims chose to align themselves with the projects of modernization and re-calculated her age — using deft stratagems of omission and commission — to fix it at early adolescence, but conservatives rejected such revisionist readings since they flew in the face of ʻilm al-ḥadīth.

From mid-20th century, amidst growing concerns of Islamic extremism, as Muslim societies and Islam itself came under renewed scrutiny, pointed criticisms of Aisha's young age at marriage began to be abundant; this has since prompted many Muslim scholars to contextualize the traditionally accepted age of Aisha with renewed vigor emphasizing on cultural relativism, anachronism, the political dimensions of the marriage, Aisha's non-ordinary physique etc. Since the late-twentieth century, polemicists have used Aisha's age to accuse Muhammad of pedophilia and to explain a reported higher prevalence of child marriage in Muslim societies.
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