Aisha bint Abu Bakr – Figure of a Woman Drawn by Men
How could one woman be so many different things to so many different people? Here a tool to delegitimize Muslims, there a traitor and an adulteress, over there the most visible of the Mothers of the Believers— Aisha bint Abu Bakr is, with the possible exception of Mohammed himself, the most controversial figure in early Islam.
For many in the West, Aisha is just a story of a woman without a name. “Did you know Mohammed had a nine year old wife?” The question is rhetorical and its implications are clear— no Messenger of God could commit such a sin and anyone who believes otherwise is simultaneously worthy of suspicion and unworthy of compassion. This criticism of rests on a naturalist view of age and sex; a person’s body should naturally present itself as ready for sex (e.g. through menstruation), and anyone who violates this commandment of nature is ill, mad, an aberration— in short, unnatural. Today’s critics of Islam have buttressed the naturalist view with a legal one by insisting that, …show more content…
All of the information available on Aisha, whether in the Quran, in Shia hadith like this, or in Sunni hadith, comes from male interlocutors. What’s more, the commentators who incorporate these points into their rhetoric have also been, and continue to be, mostly men. While Aisha is hardly alone in having her memory co-opted by men, hers is especially noteworthy because most the discussions surrounding her— her age at marriage, her alleged adultery, her position as an exemplary wife and woman— have overtly gendered implications. Thus, these conflicting views of Aisha may tell us more about the men who wrote about her or have used other men’s accounts of her than they do about Aisha herself. As so and so said, “Aisha is as a character of history is a story of men telling other men about women through the memory of a
How could one woman be so many different things to so many different people? Here a tool to delegitimize Muslims, there a traitor and an adulteress, over there the most visible of the Mothers of the Believers— Aisha bint Abu Bakr is, with the possible exception of Mohammed himself, the most controversial figure in early Islam.
For many in the West, Aisha is just a story of a woman without a name. “Did you know Mohammed had a nine year old wife?” The question is rhetorical and its implications are clear— no Messenger of God could commit such a sin and anyone who believes otherwise is simultaneously worthy of suspicion and unworthy of compassion. This criticism of rests on a naturalist view of age and sex; a person’s body should naturally present itself as ready for sex (e.g. through menstruation), and anyone who violates this commandment of nature is ill, mad, an aberration— in short, unnatural. Today’s critics of Islam have buttressed the naturalist view with a legal one by insisting that, …show more content…
All of the information available on Aisha, whether in the Quran, in Shia hadith like this, or in Sunni hadith, comes from male interlocutors. What’s more, the commentators who incorporate these points into their rhetoric have also been, and continue to be, mostly men. While Aisha is hardly alone in having her memory co-opted by men, hers is especially noteworthy because most the discussions surrounding her— her age at marriage, her alleged adultery, her position as an exemplary wife and woman— have overtly gendered implications. Thus, these conflicting views of Aisha may tell us more about the men who wrote about her or have used other men’s accounts of her than they do about Aisha herself. As so and so said, “Aisha is as a character of history is a story of men telling other men about women through the memory of a