I encountered the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile (or "pedophile rapist" to be precise) again the other day in comments to a blog, and while it never seems quite worthwhile to answer this in blog comments, since the issue of Aisha’s age at marriage is complicated enough to take a bit of doing to discuss in full, and the person raising the issue rarely seems interested in hearing contradictory evidence anyway, I thought I would just do an entry here that I could link back to the next time the temptation to respond arises.
The Wikipedia article on Aisha has a good summary of the conflicting traditions and histories about Aisha’s age at marriage to Muhammad, and also of the difficulties resolution of this controversy pose to Islamic theological method. Another critic of the story that Aisha was married at the age of nine goes further and attacks the credibility of the narrator of the main hadith in question (the most important ones are attributed to Aisha, but hadith were preserved only as an oral tradition for about 170 years; M. Amir Ali is challenging the credibility of the transmitter of traditions attributed to Aisha and others, which were in turn collected and authenticated by al-Bukhari et al), finding also a few more hadith in addition to the historical sources cited in the Wikipedia article that seem to conflict with the marriage at nine story.
So that’s about as clear as mud. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the story clearly has been garbled in the transmission one way or the other. Why has 9 prevailed over the more customary marriage age of 13 or post-puberty for Arabs, which some sources also support as the marriage age for Aisha, in Muslim historiography? I think a partial answer may be found in D.A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr.
Spellberg relates two lists of attributes supposedly recited by Aisha herself in the works of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d. They are both related in the first person; the first is introduced with the words: I was preferred above the [other] wives of the Prophet by ten [attributes]:
1. He [Muhammad] married no other wife as a virgin except me.
2. He didn’t marry anyone else whose mother and father were both emigrants.
3. Allah sent down my innocence from heaven.
4. Gabriel brought him [Muhammad] my likeness in silk from heaven saying, "Marry her for she is your wife."
5. He and I used to wash from a single vessel and he didn’t do that with any of his wives except me.
6. He used to pray when I was in his presence. He did that with none of his wives except me.
7. He received revelation while he was with me. This didn’t happen when he was with any of his other wives.
8. He [Muhammad] died in my arms.
9. He died on a night which had been turned over to me.
10. He was buried under my house.
And introducing a second list, Aisha says "I received attributes which were not granted [any other] wife."
1. The Prophet of Allah took me as his wife when I was a girl of seven.
2. The angel brought Muhammad my likeness in the palm of his hand.
3. He [Muhammad] consummated the marriage when I was nine.
4. I saw Gabriel and no other wife saw him except me.
5. I was the most beloved of his wives.
6. My father was the most beloved of his companions.
7. The Prophet of Allah fell ill in my house.
8. I nursed him.
9. Muhammad died and no one witnessed it except myself and the angels.
Spellberg observes:
Four factors found in the two lists of Ibn Sa'd make specific mention of A'isha's marriage. In the first list, A'isha states that she was the only woman the Prophet married "as a virgin." (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8:58, 63; ibn Hisham, Kitab sirat rasul Allah, v.1 pt.2: 1001). This obviously prized though fleeting physical asset allowed A'isha to remind her husband that all his other wives, as widows, had been physically intimate with other men. Reference to her unique virginity, narrated on A'isha's authority, caused the Prophet to smile (Ibn Sa'd, 8:80). A'isha's virginity, defined as a special attribute, emphasizes her sexuality as the Prophet's marital prize, a mark of distinction which supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity. Unlike the Prophet's daughter Fatima, whose designation in later medieval sources as al-Batul, "the virgin," will allow her transcend aspects of more mundane female biology, not in the conception of her children but in matters of menstruation and parturition, A'isha's virginity merits no honorary epithet, but remains part of her sensual legacy as the Prophet's spouse.The second list confirms the particulars of the marriage by explaining that A'isha was seven when she married the Prophet and nine when the union was consummated. A'isha's age is a major preoccupation in Ibn Sa'd where her marriage age varies between six and seven; nine seems constant as her age at the marriage's consummation. (Ibn Sa'd, 8: 58-62, where hadith concerning her age are repeated more than ten times. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4: 71.; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6: 118. Both al-Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal maintain the ages as six and nine.) Only Ibn Hisham's biography of the Prophet mentions that A'isha may have been ten years old when the Prophet consummated the marriage (Ibn Hisham, v.1 pt.2: 1001). All of these specific references to the bride's age reinforce A'isha's pre-menarcheal status and, implicitly, her virginity. They also suggest the variability of A'isha's age in the historical record. (For disputed date of birth, see al-Tabari, Ta'rikh, 4: 2135 and its contradiction within the same chronicle, 4: 1262. For her death date at sixty-seven, not sixty-six, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-a'yan, 3: 16).
So firstly it seems that a pre-menarchal age was always attributed to Aisha in early sources; it is only where this indirectly trips up other methods of historical dating linked to Aisha that we see any real disagreement. Secondly, her young age and therefore indisputable virginity were seen by her biographers (and perhaps Aisha herself if we can trust the sources) as evidence of her specialness to the Prophet.
And why is the specialness of Aisha important in Muslim history? Spellberg notes that Ibn Sa’d and the other medieval historians she quotes were writing just around the time when the ongoing dispute among Muslims about the status of Ali had finally been formalized into a sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Muhammad had died leaving no male children who survived into adulthood. Community leaders chose Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, as the first successor to Muhammad. Some members of the community thought that Ali, the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, should have been chosen instead. However, Ali was passed over two more times, in favor of Umar and Uthmann. When Ali was finally chosen as the fourth caliph to succeed Muhammad, Aisha led part of the community into a battle to prevent his succession. The battle was a bloodbath, but more so for Aisha’s side, and Ali assumed the Caliphate (but was soon thereafter assassinated, and the Umayyad dynasty began its rule of the Ummah).
Aisha’s presumed special status is understood by Sunni Muslims as evidence for the legitimacy of Abu Bakr as Caliph, and therefore implicitly the whole chain of succession after him, since the subsequent decisions of the leaders of the community are implicitly validated by the legitimacy of the first one. And Aisha herself was deeply involved in these controversies, and may have exaggerated some aspects of her history in order to legitimate herself (according to a standard that "supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity" to be sure) following her instigation of a battle that nearly destroyed the Ummah.
Or maybe Aisha really was nine when she married Muhammad. In a discussion on the islamicfeminist community (which unfortunately has since been deleted, and was also where I found the links above) at LiveJournal, one commenter noted that it was probably time for Muslims to begin taking a more anthropological view of Muhammad and the original Muslim community, viewing them as products of a very different society from ours in the far past, instead of treating every single thing they did as exemplary, and falling into the "trap" of trying to justify every aspect of their history, good or bad. This is probably easier said than done, since so much Islamic theology and jurisprudence uses the details of the lives of the Prophet and the Companions as guides to law and ethics. But it would simplify more than a few things, too.