Aisha was not a child Her age at the time of Marriage | Mufti Abu Layth

uh one of the things that really did it for for me as an individual on this matter of the age of aisha or the allahu anha was learning the the backdrop to when the prophet gets married following so the year of sorrow and he's lost hadith he's lost abu talib and it's the worst most tragic year for the prophet and he's got young children at home and he's got you know he he works for a living he he's got the message and the message doesn't even seem to be going it doesn't seem to be flowing there's the that if incident

he's getting attacked beaten up he's lost his kind of solidarity with quraish or support or at least his indemnity with quraysh because of abu talib no longer being there and then he's approached when he's sitting uh quite uh very saddened and he's approached by hola who asks him that uh because i mean he's he's down um she asked him that why don't you get married and and he says well who do you have in mind and she recommends two people she recommends soda and she recommends aisha now

the interesting thing is that at that time uh a wife having a wife could have helped the prophet in several aspects it could have helped him uh from a personal perspective in his his feeling down companionship helping him mentally it could have uh it could have helped him by taking care of domestic issues taking care of the children at home it could have helped him in the sense of the da'wah in in preaching and going forth and and serving like being a backbone to the prophet the way khadijah was radhila now it could have helped him with with intimacy and just being having somebody to be

intimate with and being close with uh now if the pr the proposition that aisha at this time was a six-year-old child what is absurd because the i mean she could not fulfill a child at the age of six i mean it's she couldn't fulfill any of those categories she in fact if anything she would just be another burden it's like the prophet has young children at home now he's just brought another child and put a child at home who who's going to take care of the children whilst he's trying to earn a living and trying to do all of these things this hadith really

you know brought the the message home for me that wait a minute this doesn't um whereas it makes sense having a partner somebody who could actually help you in these categories of life i mean there's a reasonable observations here that uh when the prophet sallam was getting married it does not make sense that he would be marrying a girl who uh would have been younger than his his daughters at the time and of course his daughters were young enough to need a motherly care and sauda would have fulfilled that by virtue of her age to marry aisha who would have been so young

as described in the hadith um would not seem to serve any reasonable purpose at that time yeah and the fact that when the prophet actually uh at the time when he mentions doesn't actually accept straight away because because she's already engaged and he says that she's already engaged so we don't know where we stand with that and then the prophet mary soda and it's only when the engagement is broken off because he says that she's been engaged for a few years and what's interesting is

i believe she was engaged to the parents of uh uh of her potential in-laws the mother says in the narration that when abu bakr goes to check that where do we stand with this engagement so she says that no i'm not interested she says that uh these people are from the the sabbath from the sabbath from these that's you know this called in early muslims and she says she says i'm not marrying my son to him i fear that she will convert him now this alone gives so many like it raised so many question marks

that first of all if she was engaged for several years what was she engaged at the age of two or three and the other thing is if she's a six-year-old child why is adida nahadem's family so bothered about her converting him to to a new face you should be afraid and yeah so i mean i thought some of these things are incredibly noteworthy uh one is a sister in the uk rokayawaris maxod her brief treaties on this uh has been published by the islamic propagation center international in birmingham and and that's an excellent summation of

uh the evidence that goes to show uh that aisha must have been much older than the ages which are mentioned in in the hadith that that is most uh notorious about this and um a sister recently a turkish sister has written a book on the life of aisha the mother of the believers uh more more generally and she has devoted a large section to dealing with similar details and um there is a shaykh in in pakistan um amjad who has written extensively about this on the understanding

islam.com website uh moreover i happen to have the good fortune to be together with sheikh dr jamal badawi in australia where we were both speaking at a conference and his lecture his entire lecture for one hour was about this subject and he went into great detail analyzing the hadith that is so quite famous about this and giving an alternative view uh reaching the same conclusion that aisha delawan would have been in her teenage years when she got married to the prophet peace be upon him rather than the sixth and nine that are mentioned in

in the traditional um narrative about this uh the the age that is reported in that popular hadith has been misstated and this is not uh surprising that this happened we can cite other uh evidence in hadith where a number has been stated incorrectly and we know this because one hadith says one number and the other had he says a different number and we know that the narrators somehow mixed up the numbers of things so she was young but when people related to each other she was young and another person says well wait a minute young how young and then the other person says well let me tell you how young and then

of course they start exaggerating the the age downwards to me age younger and younger and we can see that by contrast the age of uh the first wife of our beloved prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam our mother khadija um her age seems to have been overstated because we know that she was the father she was the mother of uh several children of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam's eight daughters fatima and rokaya omokusum

yeah so um and then at least two boys we know their names to be uh tahir and uh and cause him after whom the prophet so for her to have given birth to that many uh children uh with the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam it means that she was married at at an age that would be conducive to that the narratives therefore which say that she was married to the prophet salallahu when she was 40 uh it now can be received with some skepticism and lawrence conrad and orientalist has actually actually studied this in great detail and he has

shown as though the details of how he has shown it now escapes me and he has shown that she would have been some more uh likely to have been 28 years old at the time that is actually the rewire of ibn abbas is actually that she was 28. okay so you can see how it's possible that uh because she was older than the prophet saw salaam he was 25 she was 28.

uh you know it got banded about that she was old and then how old let me tell you how old she is and then it gets exaggerated upwards so her age ironically was exaggerated upwards whereas on the other hand by contrast the age of eyeshadow was exaggerated downwards this seems to be a better overall explanation