At 02:33 AM 1/1/2013, Jojo Jaro wrote:
So, muslims approve of marriage with sexual relations to a 9 year
old menstruating little girl?'''
There are only 2 possible answers: Yes or No. But let's see how
Lomax will spin this.
The general answer is No. But it is also possible to find a situation
where the answer would be Yes. I haven't asked "muslims," and it's
clear that some Muslims would just answer No, and those that would
answer Yes would not answer so unconditionally. A great deal would
depend, as with all polls, on how the question is asked.
Remember, the general answer is No.
So how could it be Yes?
1. The society recognizes her as married and that she has reached the
conditions of consent.
2. The parents have approved of the marriage.
3. The marriage is not otherwise illegal.
and all of this probably requires
4. She does not resemble what comes to *our* mind when we say "9 year
old menstruating little girl." She just happens to be, we know
because it was assumed in the question, nine years old.
Jojo
PS. Note that 2 respected and venerated muslim sources (Sahih
Muslim and Sahih Bukhari) have indicated that A'isha was indeed 9
years old when muhammed started having intercourse with her; yet you
find Lomax still attempting to throw confusion as to A"isha
age. Yet he does not say exactly what age he believes A'isha was
when muhammed consumated the marriage.
Jojo keeps repeating Muslim and Bukhari like a mantra. We have
reviewed what they said. They don't mention intercourse, per se.
There is a much weaker tradition from Abu Dawud, cited on the
Christian polemic site, translated there, that purports to say that
they had intercourse when she was nine. But translators often
substitute whatever meaning they think is going to explain the
situation. So what we know from the *translation* of Abu Dawud is
that the translator believed it was about consummation. Was an actual
word for "intercourse" used? I don't know. I didn't see a reliable
source on this, and I don't have Abu Dawud.
I have consistently written that *it is possible* that Ayesha was
nine. Which could mean almost ten.... and birthdays were not
celebrated. A statement of age like this, perhaps made eighty years
later (!) can only be taken as something approximate. She was young!
She was his youngest wife, and the only virgin wife. As has been
pointed out, one of the problems with hadith about Ayesha is that
Sunnis were anxious to establish her as the most favored wife, for
political reasons, and her youth was emphasized to make the "virgin"
point. She had been betrothed before. (Don't these guys notice that?)
(Don't these guys notice that, had Muhammad been dominated by his
sexuality, he could have had whatever he wanted?)
So Lomax, based on your "considerable" research into this topic,
what was A'isha age when muhammed started having intercourse with her?
It's not found in the sources, most of them. The "considerable
research" I have done consists of a few days reading sources on the
internet, checking what books I have, and that's it. What's clear --
it's easy to find -- is that many sources do say "nine." However,
when we look more closely at that, they are assuming that being taken
to his house means they were having intercourse. Maybe. Maybe not.
Again, it is very clear that many Muslim sources do consider that a
girl at nine *might* be able to give consent. What the critics don't
realize is that age is not a condition, maturity is, and there are
other conditions. There is *no* opinion that a nine-year old girl is
marriageable unless a set of conditions have been met. We found, from
the Christian web page, only Maududi saying something like that, and
Maududi is basically, to be blunt, an idiot. (Even Maududi, though,
would agree about the additional conditions, he was just being incautious.)
There would obviously be exceptions, but I learned early on not to
rely on Pakistanis for the religion. I actually accepted Islam at the
suggestion of a Pakistani professor of Farsi, and for years I assumed
that he knew Arabic. No. When a real question came up, all he could
do was repeat what he'd been told, and when I tried to point to the
Qur'anic verses on it, he was helpless and hopeless, and the opinion
he'd given me, about divorce, was dead wrong. And he'd followed the
defective advice himself! What he was claiming was the *only* way to
divorce was actually, from authoritative sources, merely allowed, far
from the best. (The best is simple, not abusive, and does not involve
anger or preventing reconciliation even after divorce. His way, I
later came to understand, actually violates the law of divorce, but
he's not the only one who thinks as he thinks.)
It took me years to recover from the bad Arabic pronunciation. They
pronounce Arabic *as if it were Farsi.*
The message to which Jojo was responding is at
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg74903.html
I decide to see if I could find the hadith fro Abu Dawud. Looking at
an on-line translation, I came across what is one of my favorite hadith.
Narrated Abdullah ibn Abbas: A man came to the Prophet
(peace_be_upon_him), and said: My wife does not prevent the hand of
a man who touches her. He said: Divorce her. He then said: I am
afraid my inner self may covet her. He said: Then enjoy her.
This was earthy, practical advice. Don't complain about your wife.
Divorce or stay married. Choose.
The hadith cited by Silas was #2116. It is missing from the on-line
translation, all the hadith from 2115 throug 2119 are missing. There
is an obvious suspicion here.
I did find a compilation of hadith from Abu Dawud that included 2116,
and there are actually several hadith there, not just 2116, but, for
example, 4915-17. 4916 is on that site, and 4917.
http://www.searchtruth.com/book_display.php?book=41&translator=3&start=0&number=4915
The term "cohabitation" is used there. It's impossible for me to know
what the tradition actually says based on translations of unknown
authority. I'll say that many of the translations I've seen are
*really poor.* I only found copies of 2116 on polemic Christian web sites.
3a. "(2116) 'A'ishah said : The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon
him) married me when I was seven years old. The narrator Sulaiman
said : Or six years. He had intercourse with me when I was nine
years old." Abu Dawud vol.2:2116 p.569
Notice the variation on age. What did she actually say? Remember that
she may have been quite old when she reported her experience, and it
may have been many years after that before anyone wrote it down....
Another hadith from the same page:
3e. (4917) 'A'ishah said: When we came to Medina, the women came to
me when I was playing on the swing, and my hair were [sp] up to my
ears. They brought me, prepared me, and decorated me. Then they
brought me to the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) and he
took up cohabitation with me, when I was nine.
It is impossible to judge what these hadith are saying without having
much more information. In looking for sources on this, there are a
huge pile of Christian sources, Christians seem to be obsessed by
this topic. There are sources also by Muslims who very much doubt the
hadith, and some conclude, by examining evidence about the age of
Ayesha, that Bukhari is just plain wrong, and that she was likely
about 17. I've seen 18 as well. What Christian critics of Islam don't
seem to realize is that distrust of hadith is *common* among Muslims,
and then fundamentalist Muslims try to prove that hadith *must* be
followed, moderates take an intermediate position.
Here is a page on the topic that specifically reviews the issue of
the reliability of Bukahari.
http://www.muslim.org/islam/aisha-age.htm
This is a page from the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement. About the
Ahmadiyya, they are generally regarded as heretics. They are often
quite knowledgeable. This page, however, covers Muhammad Ali, who is
the translator of the Qur'an I found most useful in learning, because
it was interlinear, and the translation stayed close to literal. I
found MA to be honest and to keep his sectarian views almost entirely
out of his translation (unlike some others). Apparently he came up
with the age of 15 at consummation. The page also cites later
research that came up with 18 or 19.
Muhammad Ali wrote long, long before this became a huge Evangelist
issue. This cannot be ascribed to attempting to cover up the facts.
