Talk:Aisha

Semi-protected edit request on 10 June 2022

Please change " Some traditional hadith sources state that Aisha was betrothed to Muhammad at the age of 6 or 7;[15] other sources say she was 9 when she had a small marriage ceremony;[16] but both the date and her age at marriage and later consummation with Muhammad in Medina are sources of controversy and discussion amongst scholars."

to
"After having become a prophet, ten years later, at the age of 50, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) needed wives to help him do the housework, take care of his children, and help him in inviting people into Islam. He wanted to marry both Sawda, who was old and widow, and the daughter of Abu Bakr, Aisha.

The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) made this request ten years after the beginning of the Revelation. Aisha was born 5-6 years before the beginning of revelation. Thus, it appears that the age of Aisha was 17-18 when she got married to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

This point is included in full detail in the book “Asr-ı Saadet (The Era of Bliss)” by Mawlana Shibli. (Ist. 1928. 2/ 997)

We can definitely conclude from the biography on Asma, Aisha’s elder sister, that Aisha was at a marriageable age when she got married to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The old biography books write about Asma as follows: “When Asma was 100 years of age, she died in the seventy third year of the Emigration (Hijrah). During the Emigration, she was exactly 27 years old. Since Aisha was 10 years younger than her sister was, she needs to be at her 17. Besides, she had been engaged to Jubair before she married the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). So she was a girl at a marriageable age.” (Hatemu’l Enbiya (The Seal of Prophets) The Prophet Muhammad and His life, Ali Himmet Berki, Osman Keskioğlu, p. 210)

We advise you to read the following explanations for detailed information regarding the issue." Afif Apurbo (talk) 20:15, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

 Not done for now: This is actually a controversial edit, so you'll need to discuss first with other editors. Please open a new section here and start a discussion. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:56, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Age of Aisha

The article clearly mentions the year of her birth as 608 and the year of her marriage as 613/614, and then says we cannot estimate Aisha's age at the time of her marriage because we don't have her "official" birth records. What? That's an absurd attempt at apologia. NebulaOblongata (talk) 19:05, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

That’s a major misrepresentation of the text you deleted and I’ve restored. Doug Weller talk 19:48, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

I see that the article says we cannot estimate Aisha's "exact" age. I will take back my earlier comment. Thanks! NebulaOblongata (talk) 12:23, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

• Comments on this rewrite (more were to follow; the last paragraph in the section is out-of-tune with the rest) are welcome. TrangaBellam (talk) 20:11, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Use of a self-published book

Aleem, Shamim (2007). Prophet Muhammad(s) and His Family: A Sociological Perspective. AuthorHouse. p. 130. She has at least one other book by the same self-publisher.[1]. She was a professor (I believe before she wrote these, the latter says now a free-lance writer) but that's all the more reason why I'd expect her to find a proper publisher. Doug Weller talk 07:07, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Adequate use of edit summaries will be helpful

I see large-scale edits being made to the article with the edit summary "ed". Such summaries are unhelpful. Edit summaries help other editors by (a) saving the time to open up the edit to find out what it's all about, (b) providing a reason for the edit, and (c) providing information about the edit on diff pages and lists of changes. NebulaOblongata (talk) 12:59, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Agree-- Toddy1 (talk) 15:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

She was not a part of ahel e bat sorry she doesn't belong in alhil e bait remove that part alhil e bat

Ahil e bat are people related to hazart fatima and imam and their childern so change it 103.155.19.229 (talk) 20:17, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

"Aisha's age has become a favorite tool of Islamophobes"

Is this a joke? Please replace Islamophobes with critics of islam. Also "favorite tool" is definitely against NPOV. --MianMianBaoBao (talk) 01:13, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes you are right. The sentence is question is not obviously supported by the source:

• Across the late-twentieth century and early twentieth century, Aisha's age has become a favorite tool of Islamophobes — accusations of Pedophilia, not as a diagnostic category but as the highest category of evil, have been floated as the justifications for apparently higher prevalence of child marriage in Muslim societies etc.

The citation does not cite any specific page of the source. The preview available on Google Books is incomplete, but gives an indication of the content, which is a nuanced appraisal of what different modern writers had said. See page 163 for a summary of what John Glubb wrote. A search on the Google Books version did not show "Islamophobe", so perhaps that word was not in the source.-- Toddy1 (talk) 09:00, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

It uses the word to describe Robert Spencer, that's all that I can see. On p. 190 I can see "In his The Truth about Muhammad: Founder ofthe World's Most Intolerant Religion (2006), Robert Spencer—front man for Jihad Watch and grand pooh-bah ofthe legion of American Islamophobes—qualifies the accusation of pedophilia as “a bit..." and on 191 "Muhammad's marriage to Aisha has become, for contemporary polemicists, evidence of pedophilia not as a medical diagnosis but as an archaic and evil force. Sodomy had served, both in the early modern period". Looks like a useful book. Doug Weller talk 12:22, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

See also page 190, which talks about Robert B. Spencer's views: he wrote that the accusation of paedophilia against Muhammad are anachronistic. He also said that although child marriage did not bother anyone at the time, its existence in Muslin communities today can be blamed on the insistence that Muhammad's model is to be literally followed. So the problem, in Spencer's opinion, is not Muhammad's behaviour, but is one of modern people.-- Toddy1 (talk) 12:19, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

On the other hand, don't ask how, I can now see that the bit about Spencer continues "“a bit anachronistic” but makes an argument similar to that made by Barham a century earlier about the Laws of Manu. Under the provocative subtitle “Pedophile Prophet?” Spencer points out that although child marriage did not bother anyone at the time, its existence in Muslim communities today can be blamed on the insistence that Muhammad’s model is to be literally followed...With this view of child marriage, which circulated in online polemics about Muhammad a de cade before Spencer’s book, we move from hierarchical rankings of societies, where some persist in primitive practices, to pedophilia. However, rather than viewing pedophilia as an individual perversion, all of Islam and every Muslim is tainted because Muhammad is the perpetrator..." I like a bit later on 191 " Because the point being made in invoking this term is not, in fact, one about its diagnostic accuracy, a rebuttal like the one off ered by Yahiya Emerick (“If Muhammad were a pedophile, he would not have waited for A’ishah to reach puberty before completing the marriage, nor would he have stopped at only one marriage to a young girl”) is utterly in effective.132 Deepak Chopra’s attempt," Anyway, suffice it to say I now have the book. Doug Weller talk 12:29, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

I think if we replace Islamophobes with polemicists that would work. Doug Weller talk 13:41, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Agreeable. I will change the cites to sfn, soon. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:21, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

References

Page number request

I'm not sure that's necessary or appropriate, WP:PAGENUM says "Specify the page number or range of page numbers." and I don't think that's too big a range. But that's just my opinion. Doug Weller talk 09:04, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Large chunks of that page range are not relevant to the statement that it is being cited for. This makes it difficult for editors to determine whether the statement in the text is supported by the citation.-- Toddy1 (talk) 13:58, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

@Toddy1 Ok, what you use in those cases is Template:Page range too broad. Give me a couple of days and I’ll see what I can do. In return would you remind me of how to recisr the citation so we can cite the same book but with different page numbers? Doug Weller talk 14:26, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

One solution is a new citation - the following assumes that you are citing pages 190-191:

• Ali, Kecia (2014). "Mother of the Faithful". The lives of Muhammad. Harvard: Harvard University Press. pp. 190–191. ISBN 9780674050600.

The advantage of this is that it is nice and intuitive to readers. There is a field in the template for quotations, which I have added that to the template above with no contents.-- Toddy1 (talk) 18:01, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good. There is a way to reuse a cite with different page numbers, I may look it up. Doug Weller talk 18:54, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

WP:SFN. TrangaBellam (talk) 13:53, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Given that Kecia Ali writes a lot, having the title in the citation increases intuitiveness.-- Toddy1 (talk) 16:01, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

I have shifted the entire paragraph to the article on Criticism of Muhammad. The edit-summary is instructive enough but I am all ears, if you disagree. TrangaBellam (talk) 04:59, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

The exact quotation from Ali 2014 you are looking for is at p. 187: 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.
With regard to this revert [2], the sources that were quoted when I restored the lead [3] are Spellberg 1994 and Armstrong 1992. I don't have access to Armstrong, but I can see that the reference to Spellberg is accurate. At p. 39, one reads: As recorded, she narrates key aspects of this brief marital chronology: “I was six years old when the Prophet married me and I was nine when he consummated the marriage. When he died, I was eighteen years old.” The source Spellberg is quoting from is Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8: 60, 62, which is a 9th century primary source (see Ibn Sa'd), so traditional hadith source is appropriate. The removed sentence looks to me like a concise overview of a topic which is extensively treated in the article, and Spellberg shows that the topic has been covered by various sources, has been the subject of harsh controversies (not only scholarly controversies, but also in the public sphere at large) and the topic is also relevant for contemporary political debates - so I think that MOS:LEAD justifies having a brief, well-sourced sentence on this aspect. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 08:40, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

The scholarly discussion around Aisha's age is more complicated than this. That secondary sources quote primary sources does not mean we should be automatically parroting them. What matters is the subsequent secondary analysis, and the conclusion of this appears to be that little can be determined for sure. However, as Ali makes, clear, this entire discussion is born out of criticism of Muhammad, and so makes a lot more sense to be hosted there. Can anyone think of another historical biography where there is an entire paragraph in the lead dedicated to the age of marriage of the individual in question? A much more lead-worthy piece of information to be added to the existing notes on Aisha's marriage to Muhammad in the lead would be the very important point made by Watt and others that the marriage helped cement tribal ties with Abu Bakr. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:19, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

I disagree. The primary source is the key to the whole question, and should remain. I also object to moving content to criticism of Muhammad. This page has already been referenced from other places, and the dispute about "Aisha's age at marriage" squarely belongs here. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:39, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Squarely belongs where? In the lead? This would be indulging in WP:RECENTISM. The material all remains in the article. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:04, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Revert

TrangaBellam has removed this but please add it back or explain why it should not be in this article.-Mossad3 (talk) 13:08, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Gitz6666 and Kautilya3 seem to want it restored (from what they've typed above).-Mossad3 (talk) 13:14, 7 July 2022 (UTC)