So, muslims do not approve of what muhammed did?
Jojo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <a...@lomaxdesign.com>
To: <vortex-l@eskimo.com>; <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:List integrity
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/vortex-l@eskimo.com/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.
