Q. You have recently stated that Lady Ayesha was about 20 years of age when she married the Prophet (peace be upon him). This is contrary to what we have learned and the common notion that she was only 9 at the time of her marriage. Could you please tell me why is it that the other view is so widespread? How come that it is held by the vast majority of Muslims, and that scholars and writers try to justify it in a variety of ways?
M. Karim
A. This is a very valid point. The question of Ayesha’s age at the time of her marriage to the Prophet (peace be upon him) troubles many Muslims, particularly in our present time when the onslaught against Islam stops at nothing. Many are those who try to attack Islam through attacking the Prophet. Yet they cannot find any justification for such attack, so they look at seemingly weak points, like his marriage to Ayesha. What we need to know is that the Prophet’s personality was without blemish. If it was true that Ayesha was 9 at the time of her marriage, we accept that and we look for a reason to explain it. However, there is much evidence to suggest that she was not. Indeed the evidence congregates towards the view that she was at least 18, and perhaps 20 or over at the time of her marriage. In my answer, I cited the authentic reports that tell us that she was engaged to someone else before the Prophet sent his proposal, and the way she was suggested to the Prophet as a possible wife, and the fact that she is mentioned among the people who accepted Islam in its very early days, certainly before year 5 of the Prophet’s message, i.e. 9 years before her marriage. I said there was further evidence, which could not be cited because of limitation of space. In fact a full treatment of this question requires several articles, which I hope to write in future.
However, the question presented today by Mr. Karim is valid. Why is the wrong view so widely held? This is not difficult to explain. What we have to look at first of all is the Arabian social environment at the time when the message of Islam was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his efforts in advocating it. At the time, the Arabs were largely an illiterate community. Only a few of them could read and write. Yet they were highly articulate. Poetry was a highly appreciated talent among them. It recorded their events, expressed their attitudes and explained their traditions. The Arabs at the time did not have a calendar by which to date their events. They dated them by some major events, always changing the reference date when a new major event took place. Thus, we know that the Prophet was born in the Year of the Elephant, which refers to Abrahah’s attempt to destroy the Kaaba, marching to Makkah at the head of an army and riding a huge elephant. Needless to say, in such a community, there was no special record of people’s births and deaths, let alone their marriages.
We have indeed a general problem with people’s ages at the time, which tend to make them either very young or very old at a particular juncture of their lives. In the case of Usamah ibn Zayd, who commanded the army raised by the Prophet to march to Palestine, confronting the Byzantine Empire. The army did not start its march immediately because of the Prophet’s illness. It only set out after Abu Bakr had been chosen as Caliph. The reports suggest that Usamah was very young, putting his age at 17 or 18. Yet a simple process of research about him and his mother will conclusively lead us to believe that he was in his middle or upper twenties, i.e. 8-10 years older. What is the reason for this discrepancy? I believe it is due to the objections voiced by some of the Prophet’s companions when Abu Bakr gave him his instructions to march. They feared that his young age was against him. Yet the same objections could be raised if the commander was 17 or 27. He is still very young for such a command. Abu Bakr refused to appoint someone else as commander, because it was the Prophet’s choice for this task.
By contrast, when certain people are said to have lived to an old age, the figures quoted seem to be greatly exaggerated. They are often said to have lived 120 years. Thus, Abd Al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s grandfather, Hassan ibn Thabit and Al-Nabighah Al-Ju’adi and several others are all said to have lived 120 years. Hassan is said to have lived 60 years before Islam and 60 years after he became a Muslim, giving him such a symmetrical life. We do not find reports of people having lived 95 years, or 103, or 87, etc. although should this have been the case they would still be thought of as having had a long life. Yet the figure 120 seems to attract better attention, although even today it is very rare. How come we have such a number of people attaining it within the relatively small population of Arabia at a time when those who reached 60 or 70 were considered elderly?
Take the other example from the Prophet’s own life. He is said to have married Lady Khadeejah when he was 25 and she was 40. Yet neither figure is totally reliable. We have reports suggesting that the Prophet was younger, aged 21, or older, aged 30 or 28. The same is true of Khadeejah who is said to have been 45, or 35, or 30, or 25 at the time of her marriage to the Prophet. All these figures are mentioned in the same book and the same paragraph. So, what was Khadeejah’s age? There is no reliable record to serve us. Therefore, we look at other facts. We know that she gave the Prophet six children over a period of 10 years, which confirms that she was at the prime of her reproductive age. Yet she was most probably older than the Prophet. This means that she was between 28 and 32 when their marriage took place. Still, wherever you go in the Muslim world people will tell you that she was 40 when she married the Prophet and he was 25. To what do we attribute the confusion? There is the common tendency that, in the absence of reliable information, people give round figures. Thus, the gap between their ages leads to stretching their respective ages downward in the Prophet’s case and upward in Khadeejah’s case to give us this long figure of 15 years, when she could have been only four or five years older than him, which is far more likely.
Another reason for a notion of this type to be so widely held is the fact that writers tend to copy each other. What is written in one book is treated as a reliable source and then produced in another. Over the 14 centuries of Islamic history, this report of Ayesha’s age has been quoted hundreds of times, in all Islamic languages. Yet a simple error could have been the cause of the confusion. Suppose that the first report which attributes to Ayesha a statement that she was six when the Prophet sent his proposal dropped one word, giving the figure six instead of sixteen, you have a possible explanation. This could have been dropped by the reporter, or the writer, or the copier, or by someone else at a later stage. Consider the possibility that a major scholar in the early period of Islam was speaking about the Prophet’s marriage to Ayesha when he said that she was 16, but one of the students who was taking notes wrote it 6, then this student became a scholar. Relying on what he wrote, he later taught in his circle mentioning the lower figure. That would have served to spread the mistake. Add to this the fact that books were always written by hand, and such errors were not uncommon. We cannot say that this is what happened, but we say it could have happened. Hence, the need for a thorough research to establish the fact. This is what I have done and concluded on the basis of available evidence that Ayesha was at least twice the age of nine when she married the Prophet.
