The Lives of Muhammad by Kecia Ali

Author:Kecia Ali
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674050600
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Panic and Polemic

More broadly, in speaking of Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha, books published in the United States around the time Haykal’s Life appeared in English and Irving’s Life appeared in Arabic tended to adopt either condescending or condemnatory tones; the latter increased in frequency and stridency as the twentieth century wore to a close. Betty Kelen, in a popular biography (1975), wrote of a “betrothal” at age seven, placing the “marriage” shortly after the move to Medina, when Aisha was nine: “We need not dwell on the abuse to the child of such a marriage,” since it was customary; further, “Ayesha was dear to Muhammad, and she loved the Prophet. We can conclude that the relationship between the two was free from outrage.”116 W. Montgomery Watt makes a similarly unperturbed assessment in Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, though he allows that “This relationship between a man of fifty-three and a girl of ten must have been a strange one.… We must remember, of course, that girls matured much earlier in seventh-century Arabia.”117 These authors were writing before hysteria about child sexual abuse had taken hold in the American imagination. By the last decade of the twentieth century and especially the first decade of the twenty-first, Aisha’s age had become a favorite argument of anti-Islam polemicists, especially but not exclusively online.118

In the wake of this public wrangling over Aisha’s age, in which accusations of pedophilia have become part of a broader public discourse about Muhammad, those who wish to rescue Islam and Muhammad from blanket condemnation attempt to contextualize the marriage. Muslim apologists online and in print often repeat some variant of the physical-precocity argument, sometimes with a mention of climate; non-Muslim authors and those writing for mainstream general readers tend to stick with arguments from custom. Colin Turner’s 2006 introduction Islam: The Basics mixes both. Fully aware of how such marriages are seen today, Turner mentions “paedophilia” and “child abuse” but hastens to reassure his readers that Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha was common for the era and that “such marriages were almost certainly not consummated until both parties had entered adulthood, which seventh century Arabs tended to reach earlier than Westerners today.”119 (Turner says that Aisha was perhaps ten, though he also says, inaccurately, that the sources are not explicit about her age, then goes on to declare it “highly unlikely that Muhammad would have taken Aisha into his bed until she was at least in her early teens, which was wholly in keeping with the customs of the day, and in context not the least improper.”)120 This reference to Aisha as a teenager is, of course, highly anachronistic; Lesley Hazelton uses the term frequently in her recent biography The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad. She suggests that in claiming that she was “six years old when she was betrothed and nine years old when the marriage was celebrated and consummated,” Aisha may have played up her youth to appear extraordinary, since “to have been married at the customary age would make Aisha normal, and that was the one thing she was always determined not to be.

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