Aisha's Age: Difference between revisions

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The case is nevertheless strong that Hisham formulated the Aisha marital age hadith in Iraq, though a couple of traditions which do not depend on that hadith may support the possibility of a historical kernal. The hadiths quoted above about the incident of the slander (al-Ifk) do not involve Hisham and emphasise that Aisha was then "a girl of young age", though the historicity of this too might be doubted given the polemical considerations around the event.
The case is nevertheless strong that Hisham formulated the Aisha marital age hadith in Iraq, though a couple of traditions which do not depend on that hadith may support the possibility of a historical kernal. The hadiths quoted above about the incident of the slander (al-Ifk) do not involve Hisham and emphasise that Aisha was then "a girl of young age", though the historicity of this too might be doubted given the polemical considerations around the event.


More significant may be an independent tradition which Little says can provisionally be traced back to the Medinan historian Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124 AH). Al-Zuhri's hadith states that the Messenger of God married Aisha bint Abu Bakr in Shawwal in the tenth year after the prophethood, three years before the migration. He arranged the marriage feast (i.e. for consummation) in Shawwal, eight months after the migration. Little speculates that Hisham picked a consummation age of nine and used this report of a three year gap between Aisha's marriage and consumation to derive six or seven as the age of her marriage.<ref>See 1 hour 38 minutes - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s Why the Aisha Marital Age Hadith is a FORGERY: An EXCLUSIVE Lecture by Dr. Joshua Little] - youtube.com, 26 February 2023<BR />One presumably later version quoted from al-Tabari in another footnote below adds that Aisha was nine</ref> Others may notice another significance to this apparently earlier al-Zuhri tradition. The three year gap between marriage and consummation mentioned therein, without any obvious polemical function (no age is mentioned), probably and independently implies that Aisha was a child at the time.
More significant may be an independent tradition which Little says can provisionally be traced back to the Medinan historian Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124 AH). Al-Zuhri's hadith states that the Messenger of God married Aisha bint Abu Bakr in Shawwal in the tenth year after the prophethood, three years before the migration, and he arranged the marriage feast in Medina (i.e. for consummation) in Shawwal, at the beginning of eight months after his emigration to Medina. Little speculates that Hisham picked a consummation age of nine and used this report of a three year gap between Aisha's marriage and consumation to derive six or seven as the age of her marriage.<ref>See 1 hour 38 minutes - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr6mBlEPxW8&t=2s Why the Aisha Marital Age Hadith is a FORGERY: An EXCLUSIVE Lecture by Dr. Joshua Little] - youtube.com, 26 February 2023<BR />One presumably later version quoted from al-Tabari in another footnote below adds that Aisha was nine</ref> Others may notice another significance to this apparently earlier al-Zuhri tradition. The three year gap between marriage and consummation mentioned therein, without any obvious polemical function (no age is mentioned), probably and independently implies that Aisha was a child at the time.


==Apologetic history==
==Apologetic history==
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