Prophet's Marriage with Aisha(RA)

This topic has been raised many of times all across the internet. It is an old technique to belittle some one by attacking his character. The western scholars in their desparation to undermine Islam, tend to attack Prophet Muhammad's(Peach be Upon Him) personality, who was solely responsible for the spreading the light of Islam to the humanity.

The human ways of living and civilization have drastically changed in the last 100 years or so. The life before that was interwined around a totally different set of norms. The present western civilization has entirely changed those norms which, as expected, didn't result in the betterment of society in terms of collective morality rather resulted in the downfall of the concepts of human dignity, morality, relationships, shame and belief in a divine being. The modern civilization has achieved the luxuries of this world based on its materialistic approach but has totally lost its way as far as the REAL objectives of the human creation are concerned. They as a whole, have put aside the divine revelation that would have showed them the reality of the purpose of their existence. Hence, in this society, human beings are allowed to define their own norms based on whatever they consider to be correct and disregard everything else that go beyond their self-defined boundaries. As a result, the homosexuality which has been a forbidden practice in all past religion and cultured societies, has been embraced by majority of westerners of today as a normal sexual orientation, if not in practice then by its acknowlegment. Similarly, the shameful exhibition of the nude women around the world is considered liberating instead of degrading and so on so forth. The interest based system which was always known to be against the divine will has been adopted globally and hence we can see the consequence of that mutiny against God in terms of poverty, hunger, killings, natual disasters etc.

Now coming back to the actual point. The age of consent for women has been between 9-12 in most part of the so called modern world just a century ago. Even today, in countries like Japan, people can legally have sex at the age of 13 while in Spain, the legal age is 12. In the so called enlightened country of USA, only just over a century ago, the age of consent was merely 10 years. California was the first state which changed that age to 14 in 1889. The French penal code raised the age of consent from 11 to 14 only a century ago. In England, the age of consent was 12 before it was raised in 1929.

So based on the above statistics, it is more than clear that people who try to accuse Prophet(PBUH) of phedophilia like to use the imposed rules in their present norm to judge an act performed in the culture of 1400 years ago (which by the way is biologically and ethically allowed in every sense) with the norms of the western standards of 21st century. The Holy Prophet is known to have married Aisha(RA) when she was about 6-7 years, waited for 3-4 years before consummating his marriage after she reached her puberty (which is the age between 9-12 for average girls) i.e. the ability for a girl to physically bear a child.

"Puberty, usually occurring during adolescence, is when kids develop physically and emotionally into young men and women. Usually, this starts to happen no earlier than about 7 to 8 years of age for girls and 9 years of age for boys (the average age is about 10 for girls and 12 for boys). " Ref: http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/sexual/precocious.html

Percentage of prophet's wives who were 17 years and older = 91 %
Percentage of prophet's wives who were widows = 75%

This clearly shows that the Prophet's marriage to Aisha(RA) at her young age was an exception and not a norm based on his other marriages. Furthermore "a paedophile's main mode of sexual satisfaction is with prepubescent girls", which is contradictory to the 91% of prophet's marriage to women 17 years and over. An unbiased examination of Prophet's life and his marriages to his wives blatantly rejects the notion of his lifestyle fitting that of a paedophile. All his brides were aged widows (except Aisha and Marya).

One more reason for prophet's marriage with Aisha(RA) was because among men, he left a lot of people who learned tremendous amount of knowledge from prophet and propagated them among their fellow men. Since prophet himself was a man, hence there was to be a mechanism for that knowledge to propagate, without any obstruction, among the muslim women and who would have been the better person than Aisha(RA) who stayed under prophet's direct influence for 10 years and lived for another 50 years after that. Most of the hadeeths that we know today are attributed to Aisha(RA) as being the narrator. Apart from that, if you see prophet's life, you will arguably discover that he stayed with his one wife Khadija(RA) during his prime youth and only in his late age after her death, he started to get married with other ladies (mostly due to political reasons i.e. for strengthening ties with other tribes). All of his wives except Aisha(RA) were over 18 and hence no where there is a trend of so called being a "phedophile" that many enemies of Islam restlessly and falsefully try to portray.