What may be referred to as the Nupur Sharma controversy has brought the whole issue of the age, at which the Prophet of Islam married Aisha, into the limelight. It has been claimed that they were married when Aisha was six years old, and that the marriage was consummated when she was nine. The following Hadith is usually cited in support: “Sahih al-Bukhari 5134. Narrated ‘Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated the marriage when she was nine years’”.
Such a statement will appear very unusual to a modern reader; though how unusual will depend on the person’s knowledge of history. Child marriage occurs in many societies, ancient and modern, and anyone acquainted with this is less likely to be shocked by its occurrence. Similarly, anyone familiar with the idea of cultural relativism in general would also be less shocked.
What is cultural relativism? A contemporary example might help answer the question. Premarital mixing of sexes is frowned upon in mostly segregated societies such as India or Pakistan, and considered immoral, but President Barack Obama dated other women, before he married Michelle, and so did Bill Clinton before he married Hillary and no-one in America thinks any less of them for having done so.
Nevertheless, followers of a religion feel compelled to defend accounts relating to the objects of their reverence. One tack employed in the debates in India, has been to compare the age at which Aisha was said to be married, with that of the age of Sita, when she was married to Rama. In the Aranya Kanda of the Ramayana (vulgate text 3.47.4-5) Sita tells Ravana that Rama and Sita set out for the forest when her age was eighteen and that of Rama twenty-five, and further, that she had stayed for twelve years prior to that in Ayodhya. This has led some to claim that Sita was six years old when Rama married her.
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This parallel then turns the debate between Hinduism and Islam on this point into a dead-heat, or at least a photo-finish.
What is often not realised is that arguments have been adduced by scholars, both within the Hindu and the Islamic traditions, which place the age of marriage of both Aisha and Sita respectively, at around 16 years.
Let us consider the Islamic side, as explained by the revered figure of Javed Ahmad Ghamdi of Pakistan.
He identifies this as a case pertaining to neither the Quran, or the Sunna, but as a matter of history. No old records are available until a century after the passing away of the Prophet.
The account of the situation, in which the question of the marriage with Aisha arises, involves a female associate of the Prophet, who sees the Prophet in a state of distress after the passing away of his beloved wife, Khadija, which left him alone to take care of many children, in addition to his other duties. She recommends marriage as a solution. When asked if there are any such possibilities, she says that if the case be that of marrying a virgin, Aisha was a possibility, and in case one had a more mature person in mind, a marriage with a woman called Sauda was also possible.
The point is, Javed Ahmad Ghamdi argues, that, given this situation, does marrying someone six years old make any sense? A child to take care of children?
Javed Ahmad Ghamdi offers an interesting explanation of what may have gone wrong. He points out that the numerals in Arabic follow the same pattern as in English, in that two numerals are joined to form another, as when we say twenty-five. What could have happened is that, in an oral tradition, the teen part of sixteen got dropped and the tradition, recorded by Bukhari, of Aisha getting married at the age of six, took root. One could then conclude that the proper age of Aisha was sixteen, a figure which got reduced to six.
Allama Syed Abdullah Tariq in India supports this conclusion by taking the comparative dates of marriage of Aisha, and Aisha’s sister, into account.
Interestingly, a similar resolution may be possible in the case of Sita. The vulgate, that is, the commonly prevalent text of the Ramayana, provides twelve years as the time Sita spends in Ayodhya after marrying Rama, before they go into exile, which leads to the calculation that she was six at the time of marriage. However, the critical edition of the Ramayana (3.45.4-5), published by the Baroda Oriental Institute, reduces this period to one year. According to this reading, then, Sita was around sixteen or seventeen when Rama married her.
Thus in both the cases, of Aisha as well as Sita, we see a similar dynamic in action.
Could it be the case that originally the date of marriage for both Aisha and Sita was around 16? But when this data moved into a society given to child marriage, both the societies tried to modify the dates to make them consistent with their social norms, especially as both the Prophet and Aisha, and Rama and Sita, were and are considered paradigmatic figures in their respective traditions.
Whatever the answer to this question, it is clear that Hinduism and Islam, as religious traditions, can provide moments of reciprocal illumination.
The author, formerly of the IAS, is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal Canada, where he has taught for over thirty years. He has also taught in Australia and the United States and at Nalanda University in India. He has published extensively in the fields of Indian religions and world religions. Views expressed are personal.
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