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Age of Aisha (ra) at time of
marriage
by Zahid Aziz
Qualities of Aisha and her role in
Islam
In any discussion on the age of
Aisha (ra: may Allah be pleased with her) at the time of her marriage with
the Holy Prophet Muhammad (may peace and the blessings of Allah be upon
him), it is of the greatest relevance to note the pivotal role she played
as a teacher, exponent and interpreter of the religion of Islam. Aisha was
an exceptionally intelligent and astute woman, a young prodigy, and this
was the main reason why she was got married to the Holy Prophet, as is
clearly proved by events after the Holy Prophet’s life. She entered his
household, shortly after his emigration to Madina, just at the time when
the teachings of Islam in all fields of life for the Muslim community were
starting to be revealed to the Holy Prophet and demonstrated by him by his
example and practice. An intellectually gifted person was required who
would have daily contact with the Holy Prophet at the closest and most
personal level, so as to absorb the teachings that he was giving on all
aspects of life by his words and actions. Such a person would need to
possess the following qualities:
an excellent, precise memory to
retain a vast amount of detail accurately, the understanding to grasp the
significance and the principles of the teachings, powers of reasoning,
criticism and deduction to resolve problems on the basis of those
teachings, the skills to convey knowledge to a wide range of audience, and,
finally, have the prospect of living for a considerable period of time
after the death of the Holy Prophet in order to spread his message to
distant generations.
That Aisha possessed all these
qualities and carried out this mission is an absolutely positive and undeniable,
historical fact. After the Holy Prophet’s death, she acted as a teacher and
interpreter of Islam, providing guidance to even the greatest of the male
Companions of the Holy Prophet Muhammad. They made a special point of going
to her to gain knowledge and seek her opinion. A vast number of sayings and
actions of the Holy Prophet are reported from her in books of Hadith. She
not only quoted his sayings and reported her observations of events, but
interpreted them to provide solutions to questions. Whenever necessary, she
corrected the views of the greatest of the Companions of the Holy Prophet.
She made rulings and judgments on which Islamic law is based.
The following are two examples of
what the Holy Prophet’s male Companions said about her:
“Abu Musa said: Whenever
there was any hadith that was difficult [to understand] for us, the
Companions of the Messenger of Allah, and we asked Aisha we always found
that she had knowledge about that hadith.”
“Musa ibn Talha said: I
never saw anyone more eloquent than Aisha.”
In the famous compilation of the
lives of saints in Islam, Tadhkirat-ul-Auliya, the author Farid-ud-Din
Attar, who lived eight centuries ago, introduces the life of the early
female saint Rabia of Basra as follows:
“If anyone says, ‘Why have
you included Rabia in the rank of men?’, my answer is that the Prophet
himself said, ‘God does not regard your outward forms’. … Moreover, if it
is proper to derive two-thirds of our religion from Aisha, surely it is
permissible to take religious instruction from a handmaid of Aisha.”
It is thus recognised, from the
earliest times in Islam, that some two-thirds of Islamic Sharia is based on
reports and interpretations that have come from Aisha.
In view of these exceptional
qualities of Aisha and the towering role played by her in the transmission
of the teachings of Islam, it is simply preposterous and outrageous to
suggest that she was the victim of some form of child and marital abuse. We
ask in particular the Christian and Jewish critics of Islam, who are
reviling the Holy Prophet Muhammad on the basis of his marriage with Aisha,
whether they can point out any example of a woman in their religions who
played a role like that of Aisha in learning the religion from its founder
and becoming the teacher and instructor of all his followers, including
men, after his death.
Age of Aisha at time of marriage
with Holy Prophet Muhammad
It is believed on the authority of
some Hadith reports that the marriage ceremony (known as nikah, amounting
to betrothal) of Aisha with the Holy Prophet Muhammad took place when she
was six years of age, and that she joined the Holy Prophet as his wife
three years later at the age of nine. We quote below from two such reports
in Bukhari.
“It is reported from Aisha
that she said: The Prophet entered into marriage with me when I was a girl
of six … and at the time [of joining his household] I was a girl of nine
years of age.”
“Khadija died three years
before the Prophet departed to Medina. He stayed [alone] for two years or so.
He married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he
consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.”
As to the authenticity of these
reports, it may be noted that the compilers of the books of Hadith did not
apply the same stringent tests when accepting reports relating to
historical matters as they did before accepting reports relating to the
practical teachings and laws of Islam. The reason is that the former type
of report was regarded as merely of academic interest while the latter type
of report had a direct bearing on the practical duties of a Muslim and on
what was allowed to them and what was prohibited. Thus the occurrence of
reports such as the above about the marriage of Aisha in books of Hadith,
even in Bukhari, is not necessarily a proof of their credibility.
Determination of the true age of
Aisha
It appears that Maulana Muhammad
Ali was the first Islamic scholar directly to challenge the notion that
Aisha was aged six and nine, respectively, at the time of her nikah and
consummation of marriage. This he did in, at least, the following writings:
his English booklet Prophet of Islam, his larger English book Muhammad, the
Prophet, and in the footnotes in his voluminous Urdu translation and
commentary of Sahih Bukhari entitled Fadl-ul-Bari, these three writings
being published in the 1920s and 1930s. In the booklet Prophet of Islam,
which was later incorporated in 1948 as the first chapter of his book
Living Thoughts of the Prophet Muhammad, he writes in a lengthy footnote as
follows:
“A great misconception
prevails as to the age at which Aisha was taken in marriage by the Prophet.
Ibn Sa‘d has stated in the Tabaqat that when Abu Bakr [father of Aisha] was
approached on behalf of the Holy Prophet, he replied that the girl had
already been betrothed to Jubair, and that he would have to settle the
matter first with him. This shows that Aisha must have been approaching
majority at the time. Again, the Isaba, speaking of the Prophet’s daughter
Fatima, says that she was born five years before the Call and was about
five years older than Aisha. This shows that Aisha must have been about ten
years at the time of her betrothal to the Prophet, and not six years as she
is generally supposed to be. This is further borne out by the fact that
Aisha herself is reported to have stated that when the chapter [of the Holy
Quran] entitled The Moon, the fifty-fourth chapter, was revealed, she was a
girl playing about and remembered certain verses then revealed. Now the
fifty-fourth chapter was undoubtedly revealed before the sixth year of the
Call. All these considerations point to but one conclusion, viz., that
Aisha could not have been less than ten years of age at the time of her
nikah, which was virtually only a betrothal. And there is one report in the
Tabaqat that Aisha was nine years of age at the time of nikah. Again it is
a fact admitted on all hands that the nikah of Aisha took place in the
tenth year of the Call in the month of Shawwal, while there is also
preponderance of evidence as to the consummation of her marriage taking
place in the second year of Hijra in the same month, which shows that full
five years had elapsed between the nikah and the consummation. Hence there
is not the least doubt that Aisha was at least nine or ten years of age at
the time of betrothal, and fourteen or fifteen years at the time of
marriage.” [4]
(Bolding is mine.)
To facilitate understanding dates
of these events, please note that it was in the tenth year of the Call,
i.e. the tenth year after the Holy Prophet Muhammad received his calling
from God to his mission of prophethood, that his wife Khadija passed away,
and the approach was made to Abu Bakr for the hand of his daughter Aisha.
The hijra or emigration of the Holy Prophet to Madina took place three years
later, and Aisha came to the household of the Holy Prophet in the second
year after hijra. So if Aisha was born in the year of the Call, she would
be ten years old at the time of the nikah and fifteen years old at the time
of the consummation of the marriage.
Later research
Research subsequent to the time of
Maulana Muhammad Ali has shown that she was older than this. An excellent
short work presenting such evidence is the Urdu pamphlet Rukhsati kai waqt
Sayyida Aisha Siddiqa ki umar (‘The age of Lady Aisha at the time of the
start of her married life’) by Abu Tahir Irfani.[4a] Points 1 to 3 below
have been brought to light in this pamphlet.
1.
The famous classical historian of Islam, Ibn
Jarir Tabari, wrote in his ‘History’:
“In the time before Islam, Abu Bakr
married two women. The first was Fatila daughter of Abdul Uzza, from whom
Abdullah and Asma were born. Then he married Umm Ruman, from whom Abdur
Rahman and Aisha were born. These four were born before Islam.”
2.
The compiler of the famous Hadith collection
Mishkat al-Masabih, Imam Wali-ud-Din Muhammad ibn Abdullah Al-Khatib, who
died 700 years ago, has also written brief biographical notes on the
narrators of Hadith reports. He writes under Asma, the older daughter of Abu Bakr:
“She was the sister of
Aisha Siddiqa, wife of the Holy Prophet, and was ten years older than her.
… In 73 A.H. … Asma died at the age of one hundred years.”
This would make Asma 28 years of
age in 1 A.H., the year of the Hijra, thus making Aisha 18 years old in 1
A.H. So Aisha would be 19 years old at the time of the consummation of her
marriage, and 14 or 15 years old at the time of her nikah. It would place
her year of birth at four or five years before the Call.
3.
The same statement is made by the famous
classical commentator of the Holy Quran, Ibn Kathir, in his book Al-bidayya
wal-nihaya:
“Asma died in 73 A.H. at
the age of one hundred years. She was ten years older than her sister
Aisha.”
Apart from these three evidences,
which are presented in the Urdu pamphlet referred to above, we also note
that the birth of Aisha being a little before the Call is consistent with
the opening words of a statement by her which is recorded four times in
Bukhari. Those words are as follows:
“Ever since I can remember (or
understand things) my parents were following the religion of Islam.”
This is tantamount to saying that
she was born sometime before her parents accepted Islam but she can only
remember them practising Islam. No doubt she and her parents knew well
whether she was born before or after they accepted Islam, as their
acceptance of Islam was such a landmark event in their life which took
place just after the Holy Prophet received his mission from God. If she had
been born after they accepted Islam it would make no sense for her to say
that she always remembered them as following Islam. Only if she was born
before they accepted Islam, would it make sense for her to say that she can
only remember them being Muslims, as she was too young to remember things
before their conversion. This is consistent with her being born before the
Call, and being perhaps four or five years old at the time of the Call,
which was also almost the time when her parents accepted Islam.
Two further evidences cited by
Maulana Muhammad Ali
In the footnotes of his Urdu
translation and commentary of Sahih Bukhari, entitled Fadl-ul-Bari, Maulana
Muhammad Ali had pointed out reports of two events which show that Aisha
could not have been born later than the year of the Call. These are as
follows.
1.
The above mentioned statement by Aisha in
Bukhari, about her earliest memory of her parents being that they were
followers of Islam, begins with the following words in its version in
Bukhari’s Kitab-ul-Kafalat. We quote this from the English translation of
Bukhari by M. Muhsin Khan:
“Since I reached the age when I
could remember things, I have seen my parents worshipping according to the
right faith of Islam. Not a single day passed but Allah’s Apostle visited
us both in the morning and in the evening. When the Muslims were
persecuted, Abu Bakr set out for Ethiopia as an emigrant.”
Commenting on this report, Maulana
Muhammad Ali writes:
“This report sheds some light on
the question of the age of Aisha. … The mention of the persecution of Muslims along with the
emigration to Ethiopia clearly shows that this refers to the fifth or the
sixth year of the Call. … At that time Aisha was of an age to discern
things, and so her birth could not have been later than the first year of
the Call.”
Again, this would make her
more than fourteen at the time of the consummation of her marriage.
2.
There is a report in Sahih Bukhari as follows:
“On the day (of the battle) of Uhud
when (some) people retreated and left the Prophet, I saw Aisha daughter of
Abu Bakr and Umm Sulaim, with their robes tucked up so that the bangles
around their ankles were visible hurrying with their water skins (in
another narration it is said, ‘carrying the water skins on their backs’).
Then they would pour the water in the mouths of the people, and return to
fill the water skins again and came back again to pour water in the mouths
of the people.”
Maulana Muhammad Ali writes
in a footnote under this report:
“It
should also be noted that Aisha joined the Holy Prophet’s household only
one year before the battle of Uhud. According to the common view she would
be only ten years of age at this time, which is certainly not a suitable
age for the work she did on this occasion. This also shows that she was not
so young at this time.”
If, as shown in the previous
section above, Aisha was nineteen at the time of the consummation of her
marriage, then she would be twenty years old at the time of the battle of
Uhud. It may be added that on the earlier occasion of the battle of Badr
when some Muslim youths tried, out of eagerness, to go along with the
Muslim army to the field of battle, the Holy Prophet Muhammad sent them
back on account of their young age (allowing only one such youngster, Umair
ibn Abi Waqqas, to accompany his older brother the famous Companion Sa‘d
ibn Abi Waqqas). It seems, therefore, highly unlikely that if Aisha was ten
years old the Holy Prophet would have allowed her to accompany the army to
the field of battle.
We conclude from all the
evidence cited above that Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) was
nineteen years old when she joined the Holy Prophet as his wife in the year
2 A.H., the nikah or betrothal having taken place five years previously.
Pasted From :
http://www.muslim.org/light/intro.htm
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