Aishah narrated that the Prophet married her when she was a girl of six and he consummated the marriage when she was a girl of nine.
– Sahih Bukhari1
In 2002, Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Vines caused an uproar in the United States when he referred to the Prophet Muhammad as “a demon-possessed pedophile.”2 The accusation of demon possession hearkened back to the “satanic verses” controversy sparked by Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, but Vines’ remarks did not reignite that firestorm. Instead, it was his accusation of pedophilia – based on Muhammad’s marriage to the young Aishah – that proved potent. Even in the post-9/11 climate of American hostility toward Islam, American Muslims found this attack on the Prophet particularly offensive. Outraged, many instinctively refused to accept the evidence provided by Vines and his associates for Aishah’s age at marriage, though they were on solid ground as to their sources.3 According to Sahih Bukhari, viewed by Sunni Muslims as the most authentic compilation of hadith reports about the Prophet and his companions, Aishah was a girl of six when her father, Abu Bakr, married her off to his close friend Muhammad. Accounts in Sahih Muslim, the second most respected compilation, suggest an age at marriage of either six or seven.4 The accounts agree, however, that she was “a girl of nine” when Muhammad consummated the marriage.
American Muslim leaders and organizations found themselves at a loss as to how to deal with the issue aside from frequent repetitions of the obvious counterclaim that Vines’ remarks were inflammatory. Most response focused on the sinister motivations behind, and the divisive effects of, Vines’ comments, using terms such as “venomous,” “bigoted,” and “hate-filled.” Sidestepping the substance of the allegations, Shakur Bolden, an Islamic Center president from Florida, declared: “It’s outrageous that he made those comments. He should not have made those comments. Those comments do not bring people together and that’s what we ought to be about – bridging communities.”5 A few spokespeople for Muslim organizations cautiously suggested that Vines’ statements were inaccurate. But in one of the few attempts to refute directly the allegation about Aishah’s age, Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the prominent Council on American-Islamic Relations, resorted to clumsily (and erroneously) suggesting that “six” and “nine” have been interpreted by many Muslim scholars to mean “sixteen” and “nineteen.”6
There is nothing new, of course, about the Prophet’s marriages being the target of non-Muslim criticism. Accusations of lust and sensuality were regular features of medieval attacks on the Prophet’s character and, by extension, the authenticity of Islam as a religion.7 This “rather abrasive criticism”8 focused, more often than not, on the large number of Muhammad’s wives or his marriage to Zaynab, the former wife of his adopted son Zayd. Aishah’s age was rarely the subject of controversy in premodern discussions. In recent years, however, it has figured prominently in criticisms leveled against Islam not only by Christian polemicists but also a number of feminist, human rights, and secularist organizations. Though the controversy over Aishah’s age at marriage died down fairly quickly in the national media, years later it still rages online, where it has appeared as a staple in evangelical polemics against Islam well before Rev. Vines’ remarks.9 Partially due to this added scrutiny, Muhammad’s marriage to Aishah has become a topic of discussion and debate among Muslims as well.
This chapter considers contemporary Muslim treatments of Aishah’s age at marriage and what they reveal about certain types of Muslim anxieties, focusing on online sources. Muslim discussions of the Prophet’s personal conduct in general, and his marriage to Aishah in particular, provide a lens through which to view changed attitudes toward sex and marriage, and unresolved concerns about the appropriateness of applying medieval standards in modern life.10 There are dangers in both historical anachronism and unchecked moral relativism, and in analyzing Muslim reflections on Muhammad’s marriage to Aishah, several questions emerge about both the accuracy and relevance of historical information. The most obvious, of course, are: how old was Aishah when her marriage to the Prophet took place? and how old was she when it was consummated? I make no attempt in this chapter to assess the historical record, nor do I take a position as to Aishah’s actual age at the time of consummation of her marriage. I do not think the Bukhari account of Aishah’s marital history is implausible, given later legal discussions of menarche and majority, nor do I view it as infallible simply because Bukhari includes it. The cavalier treatment of this hadith by those who find its content objectionable, however, has implications that many Muslims not directly engaged in ongoing polemical struggles have not recognized. Rejecting the view that Aishah was six and nine, respectively, at marriage and consummation implies a willingness to question the reliability of Bukhari’s compilation which, under other circumstances, can subject one to attack.
How to treat hadith texts is perhaps the most crucial methodological issue for contemporary Muslim reformist thinkers. Just as with the Prophet’s ownership of Mariyya, or his actions in permitting Muslim soldiers sexual access to females captured in battle, if one accepts the hadith account of his marriage to Aishah, one confronts the actions of the Prophet in doing something that is unseemly, if not unthinkable, for Muslims in the West. Suggesting that he was wrong to do so raises profound theological quandaries. Yet accepting the rightness of his act raises the question: on what basis can one reject the marriage of young girls today? At stake are broader issues regarding the relevance of prophetic example to Islamic sexual ethics and the relevance of historical circumstance to the application of precedent.
Contemporary Muslim discussions of the Prophet’s marriages in general, and his marriage to Aishah in particular, are attentive to the broader climate of non-Muslim scrutiny and criticism of Islam. As in controversies over female circumcision, Muslim discourses on the Prophet’s personal life have the dual objective of defending Islam by responding to allegations of impropriety while also engaging in intra-Muslim reflection and debate. There is a voluminous Muslim-oriented literature, in pamphlets and books, treating the Prophet’s wives, and making reference to the Prophet’s exemplary behavior as a husband.11 Not surprisingly, there are also numerous discussions of these topics on a variety of Internet sites, expressing diverse perspectives, and addressed to different audiences. Muhammad’s marriage to Aishah is a prominent theme in treatments of the Prophet’s married life. Some articles explicitly respond to criticism of the marriage; these range from refutation to apologetic to counter-polemic, and seem to be mostly directed toward non-Muslims. Other pieces – articles, fatwas, question/answer format discussions, and postings in chat rooms and on discussion boards – are geared toward intra-Muslim dialogue. Even in Muslim-focused forums, though, the various approaches adopted by Muslim authors reflect their sense that they are engaged in an ongoing ideological struggle with “Christianity” and “the West.” This oppositional stance emerges clearly in directly polemical articles but is present at least as an undercur-rent in almost all discussions.
The variety of Muslim responses to the issue of Aishah’s age at marriage reflects differing audiences and attitudes to the hadith sources as well as varying levels of identification with the world-wide umma, or Muslim community. A few groups outside the mainstream, such as the Ahmadiyya or the Submitters, flatly deny that Aishah was nine when she began marital life with the Prophet. They do so by rejecting the authority of the hadith that present this “fact.” One online Ahmadi source questions the credibility of the reports about Aishah’s age at marriage while attempting to defend the authenticity of the hadith literature as a whole; the article suggests that “the compilers of the books of Hadith did not apply the same stringent tests when accepting reports relating to historical matters as they did before accepting reports relating to the practical teachings and laws of Islam.”12 In making this distinction between history and law, the author attempts to deny the information in the report at hand without impugning the reliability of one core source of Muslim ritual and law. Reflecting its increased distance from Muslim orthodoxy, the Submission site, linked to the organization founded by controversial figure Rashad Khalifa, goes much further, equating hadith to Internet rumor: “All the stories circulating on the Internet and in the hadiths [sic] books about Aishah’s marriage at age of 6 or 9, are no more than lies found in the corrupted books of Hadiths and completely contradict the teachings of the prophet Muhammed that came from his mouth, the Glorious Quran.”13 Despite their different attitudes to the hadith sources, both of these groups on the margins of Muslim orthodoxy agree with non-Muslim polemicists that if the Prophet had indeed engaged in sex with a nine-year-old girl, regardless of whether or not she was his wife, such behavior would be blameworthy. For these groups, the conflict over Aishah’s age provides a chance to prove that they alone embrace “true” Islam, while other Muslims are guilty of distorting the legacy of the Prophet.
Most Muslim authors, though, are not so openly dismissive of the hadith sources, however inconvenient they may find them in this case. Those who reject the notion that the Prophet consummated his marriage with Aishah when she was nine sometimes argue or merely insinuate that the specific reports cited are inaccurate, leaving aside the question of the reliability of Bukhari or Muslim as a whole, and indeed usually refraining from even mentioning the specific location of the reports in question. For example, T.O. Shanavas, affiliated with a Kentucky-based organization called the Islamic Research Foundation International14 simply states that “We do not know the exact age at the time of her marriage due to lack of reliable records.”15 Other accounts may attempt to discredit the reliability of Hisham b. ‘Urwa as a narrator, in order to cast doubt on the particular account in question, which is related from Aishah on the authority of her nephew ‘Urwa on the authority of his son Hisham.16 Alternately, they may propose a different chronology, drawing from sira narratives, suggesting an earlier date of birth for Aishah based on an account declaring her to be a “girl” when a particular event occurred. Recalculating Aishah’s age at marriage based on this nebulous evidence, such articles generally put her in her early to mid-teens at the time of consummation.
The attempt to revise the standard narrative of Aishah’s age at marriage is not limited to online sources. In fact, the specific features of the online discussion can be better appreciated after a brief detour to evaluate how the question of Aishah’s age is treated in several recently published or reprinted works aimed at Muslim audiences. The late Pakistani ‘alim Syed Suleman Nadvi writes proudly of her youth and virginal status, declaring: “Out of all the wives of the Holy Prophet [only] Hazrat Aishah had the distinction of being a virgin wife.”17 The “wedlock” occurred when Aishah was at the “tender” age of six. Three years later, “the consummation of her marriage” occurred. “Aishah was then only nine years of age,” he writes.18 The “only” in Nadvi’s statement is a mark of pride, not a condemnation. Nadvi here echoes statements attributed to Aishah herself in classical sources including Ibn Sa‘d, where her youth and especially virginity at marriage were a mark of honor, not a badge of shame.19
By contrast, in his book on the Prophet’s wives British Muslim Ahmad Thompson studiously avoids any mention of consummation. Thompson presents a succinct account of events: “Soon after arriving in Madina, ‘A’isha, who was now nine years old, was married to the Prophet Muhammad, who was now fifty-four years old. It was at this point that she left her family’s household and joined that of the Prophet Muhammad.”20 The age Thompson provides for Muhammad in this passage coincides with the standard historical view of when consummation took place; those who dispute Aishah’s age at that time do so by suggesting an earlier birthdate rather than a later date of consummation. By giving Aishah’s age as nine when she “was married,” Thompson thus implicitly accepts the Bukhari view of when consummation occurred. Yet by not mentioning the earlier contracting of the marriage at age six or seven, Thompson leaves the reader free to imagine that Aishah’s joining of the Prophet’s “household” at age nine represents a mere shift of residence, not the beginning of a marital sexual relationship.21
Mumtaz Moin, a Pakistani author, devotes one lengthy paragraph in her biography of Aishah to the question of her age at consummation, but refrains quite deliberately from taking a definitive position. She begins by noting that “The Muslim medieval writers generally accepted the hadithes, according to which the age of ‘A’ishah at the time of her nikah with the Prophet was six or seven years, and thus she was nine years old when the marriage was consummated, three years later.” Immediately following this, she declares that this view of events has “been criticized by modern historians in the light of careful research. They hold that she was fourteen or, according to some authorities, fifteen years of age at the time of the consummation of marriage.” While she refers to a few of the pieces of evidence cited in support of this view, mainly two references to Ibn Sa‘d (who elsewhere gives the same information as Bukhari), she does not name or cite any specific modern scholars who have purportedly upheld it.
Moin proves reluctant to advocate these revisionist views explicitly, presenting her points in detached terms, using expressions such as: “They hold,” “They base their argument,” “They also hold,” “It has also been argued,” and “It is further argued.” Nonetheless, Moin structures her discussion in such a way that she leaves the reader with the impression that Aishah was fourteen or fifteen at consummation.22 The assumption that she supports this view is strengthened by her reiteration, in the conclusion to the chapter, that “although most of the medieval Muslim historians and a number of modern writers” – and she goes on to add the “Western Orientalists” to this group, in a further move to discredit their stance – “have rather uncritically accepted the view that ‘A‘ishah was only nine years old when her marriage was consummated, there are valid reasons to differ from this view.”23 Moin thus impugns the reliability of the accepted narrative without directly confronting the hadith sources or explicitly affirming an alternate view.
The authors of online materials are dealing with an environment that differs in crucial ways from that of these authors. First, while Nadvi, Thompson, and Moin are addressing the question of Aishah’s age at marriage in the context of larger works on, respectively, the female companions of the Prophet, the Prophet’s wives, and Aishah herself, online materials are usually accessible in such a way that the question of Aishah’s age appears separately from any other biographical discussions. Second, while some of the online discussions are aimed specifically at Muslims, the availability of materials to anyone with Internet access makes the actual audience significantly more diverse. Though, of course, there are no restrictions preventing non-Muslims from purchasing books from Islamic publishing houses, it is less likely that they will come across these materials without putting significant effort into obtaining them. Third, and importantly, those who gain access to online articles discussing Aishah’s age at marriage will likely have located them through an Internet search engine. This means that readers have plenty of opportunity to compare and contrast various accounts, making it more important to address competing perspectives directly.
That said, quite a number of online articles simply refrain from providing specific details about the Bukhari hadith, even to question its reliability. Thus, a response to a query posted at Islam Online quotes Muzammil Siddiqi, former president of the largest American Muslim organization, the Islamic Society of North America. Siddiqi does not discuss textual evidence specifically but asserts that “Historically, it is not confirmed that she was 9 years old when she came in the household of the Prophet. There are various reports from age 9 to age 24.”24 Later, he notes that “I do not agree that she was 9.”25 Such a formulation, with only vague references to “various reports,” without any consideration of relative authoritativeness of the sources, sidesteps the problem of the canonical nature of the hadith included in Bukhari’s Sahih.26 Siddiqi treats the report on which Vines’ accusation is based, and on which most polemics center, as simply an unconfirmed report with which he does not agree; he deftly dodges the larger issue of the reliability of Bukhari’s accounts.
In the context of an ongoing polemical struggle, however, rejection of the narrative found in Bukhari and elsewhere would be a dangerous tactic, since it grants the premise that the most respected and widely accepted textual sources for Islam, outside of the Qur’an, are unreliable. Thus, those pieces found at the “Answering Christianity” website (engaged in an ongoing series of detailed and vigorous arguments with the “Answering Islam” site) do not ever question the premise that Aishah was nine at the time her marriage was consummated. Instead, they turn first to rational justification and then to counter-polemic.
Responding to the argument that it was morally wrong and sinful for Muhammad to have had intercourse with such a young girl, the authors at Answering Christianity and other polemical sites argue that marriage at puberty – which they assume Aishah had reached – has historically been a common human practice. The Prophet’s consummation of a marriage with a nine-year-old girl was perfectly acceptable, they point out, in its socio-historical context. Puberty marked both physical and social maturity, and Muhammad’s contemporaries found nothing unusual in this marriage. Even medieval critics of Islam did not object to this marriage on the basis of Aishah’s youth. Thus, one author notes that “It is therefore undeniable that consummating the marriage upon puberty was also their practice and not prohibited in their religions. The age restrictions therefore only came to certain countries in our current century. It is indeed extremely hypocritical and ‘self-righteous’ to judge other centuries, based on new criteria.”27 Proceeding to counterattack, the authors claim that biblical and rabbinic sources demonstrate the legitimacy of marrying very young girls. Indeed, they charge that criticism of the Prophet’s marriage to Aishah is hypocrisy given the acceptability of even larger age gaps between some male figures and their female consorts.28 One prominent line of argument distorts a Talmudic discussion to suggest that Jewish law permits men to have sex with three-year-old girls.29 Compared to such a rule, a nine-year-old girl seems positively mature.
It is worth pointing out, however, that despite the suggestion by some of these authors that the delay between the contracting of Aishah’s marriage and its consummation was in order for her to reach puberty, I have not found explicit references in classical sources to Aishah’s menarche serving as the trigger for consummation of her marriage; in a few instances, precisely the opposite claim is made.30 Subsequent legal discussions fixing nine as an age of presumptive or potential majority if the girl claims menarche sometimes rely on a parallel to Aishah’s age at consummation. However, majority and/or arrival at puberty have no necessary connection with the consummation of marriage. Though it is sometimes misleading to extrapolate back from later legal discussions, there was general agreement among later jurists that the wife’s puberty was not a necessary precondition for consummation of a marriage. Pre-modern sources, including legal handbooks and Ottoman court archives, link a wife’s readiness for consummation not to bulugh but rather to being physically desirable and fit for intercourse.31
Quite a number of articles geared at Muslims adopt and adapt arguments found in these polemics and counter-polemics, reshaping them into apologetic form, aimed at reassuring readers.32 The issue of Aishah’s age at marriage is often framed as a matter of addressing “misconceptions” held by non-Muslim Westerners, even when the author and audience are both presumably Muslim. For example, one petitioner at Islam Online requests that the mufti “help us address the misconceptions filling the mind of some people, especially the Westerners about the Prophet’s marriage to “Aishah, may Allah be pleased with her, as they claim it to be a sign of child abuse[.]”33Another query, addressed to the online mufti of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami by a South African doctor, describes having read the hadith discussing Aishah’s marriage as part of a Muslim study group. The writer then requests guidance as to how to answer questions from non-Muslims about the matter. The response from mufti M. Haq displays a great deal of angst over having to address the topic, noting that “I find it hard to discuss” and declaring that “I wished you had avoided this marriage or age question.”34 It is improper, he makes clear, for a Muslim to entertain doubts about any aspect of the Prophet’s conduct. It seems that the mufti is picking up on the unarticulated anxieties of his questioner, who had actually only asked about strategies for responding to non-Muslims. However, there is no suggestion that this questioner had actually been asked about the issue by anyone; it seems likely that he felt discomfort at Aishah’s youth and was asking about how to discuss the matter with non-Muslims as a way of asking for explanation and justification of Muhammad’s conduct without suggesting that he himself harbored any doubts about its propriety. In another instance, a contributor to a Muslim discussion board makes explicit the connection between being asked about the marriage and feeling discomfort. He states that a question from his Christian friend “left me with a thorn in the heart of my faith.”35
Clearly, whatever the context in which it is raised, Aishah’s age at marriage is a difficult topic for many Muslims. To a much lesser extent than in published works directed at Muslim audiences, some online authors do present specifically “Islamic” rationales for the marriage of Muhammad to Aishah, thus contributing to a view of the marriage as serving a larger divine purpose and rendering irrelevant any discussion of Muhammad’s motivations. The marriage was divinely ordained, they point out, with the angel Jibril having displayed an image of Aishah to the Prophet, declaring that she would be his wife. Further, the marriage cemented political allegiances and was therefore important to the Muslim community.36 Most salient to the question of age, Aishah’s youth enabled her to live a long time after the death of the Prophet and serve as an authority on his actions. Thus, as Sabeel Ahmed writes, “The Prophet married Aishah for the benefit of Islam and Humanity.”37 The notion of a divine purpose to the marriage is, of course, not likely to sway anyone who views the marriage as evidence for Muhammad’s base instincts, or indeed anyone who does not believe in Muhammad’s prophethood. The inclusion of this type of material in articles centered on Aishah’s age suggests that, rather than solely addressing non-Muslim criticism, the authors recognize the need to reassure and convince Muslims of the appropriateness of this marriage.
The need to assuage Muslim doubts vies with the desire to present an Islamic critique of Western and modern cultural ideals and social practices. The author of one article from the Jamaat-e-Islami website addresses the contemporary relevance of this marriage when asked about age differences in marriage and the Prophet’s marriage to Aishah specifically. He counsels that while child marriage might seem unacceptable today, and Muslims are under no compulsion to engage in it, one should be wary of criticizing it. Too strong a rejection of child marriage is tantamount to accepting a Western agenda of women’s liberation and even “UN sponsored shari’ah.”38
The anxiety over capitulation to “Western” norms is ever-present in Muslim discourses, even when texts are written by, and aimed at, Muslims living – and in some cases, born – in the West. One article that strikes a particularly defiant tone in this regard is the widely cited “The Young Marriage of ‘Aishah” by AbdurRahman Robert Squires.39 This article first appeared in 1999, three years before Vines’ remarks, and it aims both at non-Muslim critics and Muslims who seek to appease them. “In the face of [non-Muslim] criticism,” Squires argues, “Muslims have not always reacted well.” Squires solidly backs the hadith sources, claiming that the evidence for Aishah’s age in Bukhari and Muslim “is – Islamically speaking – overwhelmingly strong and Muslims who deny it do so only by sacrificing their intellectual honesty, pure faith or both.” Presumably, Squires would have harsh words for former ISNA president Siddiqi, who referred to these reports as “not confirmed.”
Yet “pure faith” seems insufficient for many Muslims, who must attempt to accept the Prophet’s action as blameless while reconciling it with their own discomfort. Reflecting the difficult nature of such an endeavor, a contributor to a discussion on ShiaChat wrote, in response to another’s suggestion to simply accept that Aishah was nine:“Like you said, there’s no point trying to cover up and make excuses for what the Prophet did, because that indicates that you are ashamed of Islam and do not agree with all of the rules, which makes you being a Muslim pointless.”40 His statement reflects unresolved, and uncomfortable, questions about the relevance of historical precedent to contemporary circumstances, and the appropriateness of using contemporary criteria to evaluate authoritative religious texts in general and prophetic sunnah in particular. The radical variations in tone and content among the online discussions of Aishah’s age at marriage suggest that many Muslims feel torn between the impossibility of uncritical acceptance of their inherited tradition and the fear that any critical stance toward that tradition will be a capitulation to those Siddiqi calls “the enemies of Islam.”
As scholars of history will affirm, one cannot use the standards of the present to judge the past.41 However, most Muslims are not historians and their interest in the Prophet’s life and conduct is not an academic exercise but an acutely felt religious one. It is a tricky proposition to accept that the Prophet is the model of conduct for all Muslims while simultaneously believing that it would be wrong of a Muslim man to follow his example in consummating a marriage with a nine-year-old. This dissonance accounts for the substantial effort many have put into asserting or proving that Aishah had reached her teen years before her marriage was consummated. A few individuals have suggested that one can accept the Bukhari account of the marriage while considering Muhammad’s marriage to the young Aishah among those matters in which the regulations governing the Prophet’s actions differ from those governing that of other believing men.42 However, though the accounts in works of sira and hadith treat Muhammad’s marriage to Aishah as something worthy of note, in part because of several divine signs of approval, they do not suggest that it was her youth that made the marriage exceptional or noteworthy.
A more satisfactory means of grappling with the Prophet’s commencement of conjugal life with a girl young by any standard, whatever her precise age, would recognize that the circumstances under which this marriage took place were radically different from those of the twenty-first century. Though in the vast majority of Muslim contexts today a nine-year-old girl would emphatically not be seen as an appropriate marriage partner, there was nothing shocking or socially inappropriate about such behavior in seventh-century Arabia.43 Though most first-time brides were not nearly so young, there does not seem to have been controversy over the age difference, and some Companions of the Prophet seem to have engaged in marriages with a similar age gap.44 Notions of childhood, as numerous historical studies have shown, vary dramatically from place to place, and imposing modern notions of adulthood as a criterion for entering into marriage validly may be inappropriate. Recognizing the vast difference between socio-historical settings can be freeing, initiating debates over the relevance of precedent, specifically sunnah, in radically changed contexts.
Just because one should not judge anachronistically, however, does not mean one should withhold all judgment. Just because a behavior is socially accepted does not make it good. As with slaveholding, thinking in terms of unjust social structures, rather than individual sin, can provide a helpful way of reconsidering matters of sexual ethics.45 But while this avoids the theologically problematic notion that the Prophet did anything objectionable, what does it say about the inherent goodness of marriage between males and females of substantially different ages and levels of experience? What of such marriages today? Is it possible to argue that in any setting – tribal Afghanistan or rural India or the Arabian desert – such marriages are always unfair to the girls involved? Can one argue that different sets of standards should apply to Muslims living in different societies, without falling into the trap of extreme moral relativism masquerading as multiculturalism? In order to address these questions, Muslim discussions of sunnah in general, and the Prophet’s marriages more particularly, need to move beyond defensiveness. Being consumed with combating negative portrayals of Islam and Muslims can lead thinkers to overlook or excuse injustices that do occur, failing in the basic duty to command the right and forbid the wrong. But how does one know right and wrong, justice and injustice?
Philosophers and ethicists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have been engaged for centuries in debates over what constitutes “good” and what is necessary for “justice.” For most premodern thinkers, slavery was morally neutral; it fell within the realm of justice – appropriate rights and obligations for those of varying statuses – provided basic parameters of good treatment were met. Likewise, equality or sameness of rights between husbands and wives in marriage was largely unthinkable. Marriage was not meant to be a setting for love between equals, but rather a particular kind of exchange by individuals fulfilling complementary roles; love was a bonus rather than a prerequisite.46 With this set of expectations, power might come to a wife because of her youth and virginity (Aishah is reported to have boasted of the latter, which distinguished her from the Prophet’s other wives, all of whom had been previously married) rather than because of wisdom and wealth.47
Those Muslims who strive for gender equality, considering it an essential component of justice, must address the central issue: what is justice and on what basis does one know it? Is something good because God says so? Or does God say it is good because it is, inherently, so?48 If what God says – and indeed, what the Prophet, “a beautiful example” (Q. 33:21), does – is automatically good, then what happens when this clashes with one’s own view of what is just or good? Arriving at a working resolution of this dilemma requires a consciousness of history and an acceptance of the role of the individual conscience. If one wants to consider certain moral standards as absolutes – such as the injustice of slavery – one must accept that God sometimes tolerates injustice. However, in a universe with human free will, allowing injustice is not the same as being the cause of it; God repeatedly rejects responsibility for injustice in Qur’anic passages declaring that God does not wrong or oppress people in any way, but rather people do wrong (zulm) “to their own selves” (or “to their own souls”).49 This assertion is freeing, in that God does not demand that Muslims act contrary to the dictates of conscience. However, it also implies a much more significant responsibility for the individual human being to make ethical judgments and take moral actions. Qur’anic regulations, in this case, must be seen as only a starting point for the ethical development of the human being, as well as for the transformation of human society.