One of the diciest parts of Muhammad’s story is that as soon as his new house was completed, he and Abu Bakr decided it was time for A’isha to move into her wife-apartment in the house. Until this time, she had been living in her father’s house, although technically married. For her wedding, they dressed her nicely and had a private family dinner, and that was that. Nobody would find much to say about it, except that the official narrative is that she was nine years old. And that raises a lot of questions. If she was only nine, was the marriage a form of abuse or neglect of a child? It’s a point that generates a lot of negative press for Muhammad, sometimes amounting to accusations of pedophilia. The more I’ve read about the situation, though, the less I can see it that way.
Most of what we know about A’isha came from her own recollections, told to others and eventually collected as hadiths. By the time A’isha was narrating her memories, she was a widow who was barred from remarrying, due to an oath that all of the Prophet’s wives took. Without children, she struggled to find her place in the rapidly-growing community after both her husband and her father had died.
It was very much in her interests to emphasize just how close she and Muhammad had been, since she was the source of many hadiths that steered doctrine. The story of her wedding was part of this emphasis; it was A’isha herself who represented her age as nine. That might mean it’s plainly true, but it also might mean it was an exaggeration. Clearly, it never entered her or anyone else’s minds that “wife age nine” might later be seen as gravely wrong.
In medieval times, it was not uncommon to set up child marriages when property inheritance was at stake, so that a father’s early death might not leave his orphaned children at the mercy of fate’s whims. It was also common to see a twelve-year-old girl as prime marriage material, at least to start setting up an important match. By the time everyone finished negotiating and traveling, the girl would be fourteen, which was considered fully grown. Such early marriage makes sense in a world where life expectancy was very uncertain and inheritance was only through birth. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that an age like fifteen was considered too young.
A’isha saw her early marriage age as a sign of how early in life she had been influenced by the Prophet. It was a mark of distinction and gave her memories more authority. It justified her continuing importance in the early Caliphs’ courts. Living there meant that she shared the common living space with Muhammad, Saudah, Ali, and the remaining unmarried daughters, while sleeping in her own room. She could be present at many discussions and recitations. The women in early Muslim stories were not sequestered: they went into the town, they approached men to speak or to argue, they made their own decisions. If Saudah had the housework under control, A’isha might have been free to sit with Muhammad’s students as much as she wanted. This was a great honor to Abu Bakr’s family.
But what if she hadn’t really been nine? In a time when few things were being written down, a little girl’s age was not important enough to memorialize. It’s possible that she was, say, twelve but remembered it as nine, trying to show how she had been at the Prophet’s side practically all her life. On the side of believing her age claim, she provided details about playing with toys while living in the Prophet’s house: her friends could still come over to play dolls, and Muhammad might sit with them for a while. That seems realistic for a child’s recollection, though it could also be a case of conflating memories from different times. But on the side of thinking she was actually older when all this happened, there are counter-anecdotes that suggest another picture.
Ibn Ishaq, born in Medina 85 years after the Prophet’s migration, was an early collector of hadiths about Muhammad’s life. He made a list of early believers, and among them he included A’isha, who should have been only a baby. (Mohiuddin, 162) What if she were at least six years old already at the time preserved by his list, old enough to repeat the confession of faith? If so, it would suggest that at the time of her informal wedding, she might have been fourteen, not nine. Further, there is a story that her first childhood betrothal was to a non-Muslim, and since Abu Bakr was one of the first converts, it suggests that perhaps she had already been born when he was still comfortable with idol-worship.
Another contrary bit of evidence is a hadith that says A’isha helped carry water-skins onto a battlefield, two years after her marriage. These skins were heavy, and a battlefield was dangerous. How much help could an eleven-year-old be? Muhammad is on record as not permitting boys to fight at such ages. But if she were sixteen by then, it makes more sense. Some accounts place her even older, walking the battlefield at nineteen, which is more like the ages Muhammad considered appropriate for a boy to be on the battlefield.
There is a deep rift between Sunni and Shi’ite accounts of A’isha. In Sunni memory, A’isha is the mother of all Muslims, a revered saint. It feels deeply sacrilegious to them to say she might have been wrong about her age. Older Islamic reasoning tended to see truth issues as starkly about deliberate lies, and how could A’isha have lived with the Prophet so long, and yet be a liar? So Sunnis tend to take A’isha’s word for it, that she was nine, and they are stuck with defending her very early marriage. By contrast, Shi’ites have no fondness for A’isha. They see her as the rival of Ali, the adopted son and intended heir. While her name is a popular choice among Sunni families, few to no little Shi’ite girls are named A’isha. So they don’t accept the hadith about her young age and are open to her having been a more normal age, like sixteen.
I have another idea to offer, which came to me as I read about the process of setting up the city-state of Medina. Let’s say A’isha was nine, but an outgoing, confident, rather mature nine-year-old, the type that doesn’t get homesick at cheerleader summer camp. Her father, Abu Bakr, is building a house in Medina also. He bought a building plot or house along the wall of Muhammad’s courtyard, which is now the mosque. He is having it modified to open into the mosque, like the Prophet’s house. The Prophet is now a man of great importance, settling disputes and teaching a growing number of students in the mosque area just outside his back door. Abu Bakr already settled his younger daughter’s fate a few years ago; she will someday be the Prophet’s wife, and nobody cares about the age difference (remember that Muhammad’s grandfather and father married a pair of cousins on the same day).
It seems obvious that Abu Bakr and his wife would say to themselves, “What are we waiting for? She’s legally married to him already, by contract, why not move her into that establishment to finish growing up?” She was going to become one of the First Ladies of Medina, and she would be more of an ornament to the household than Sawdah. So why not just do it? She’d be 100 feet away, they’d see her every day, and it’s not like she’d be sorry to become more important. If that’s the way it seemed, then sex had little or nothing to do with it. Wives who were too young were just moved in, and then they finished growing up, and assumed a sexual role when they felt like it. It probably became clear to A’isha that if she decided she was up for sex, it would increase her prestige in the new household, establishing her socially as a full adult. She may have been old enough without questions, or she may have been as young as she said. In either case, it doesn’t seem to have been about sexual attraction to children.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings.
- Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Meraj Mohiuddin and Sherman Jackson.