Running these couple videos through video to text. Here's the transcript of this one

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCMikLWgDgO/

Let's dive into a topic that's been widely misunderstood and has been doing the rounds again recently. Namely, Ayesha's age at the time of marrying the Prophet Sala Lahali Asalim. A lot of people have heard or even assert that she was 6 or 9, but there's a lot to indicate that this is not the case. Now, despite having written and published two books on Ayesha, I have to admit I have barely addressed this issue because I felt the discourse was once set by Islamophobes and that really the Muslims know better by now. However, when you look at statistics on child marriage in the world today and some of the horrific opinions currently being expressed by certain folk on social media, I realise this issue still needs tackling head-on. And we can tackle this in a number of ways, so let's start with the Hadith. So you've probably heard that Sahihal Bukhari has a few reports saying Ayesha was 6 years old at marriage and 9 years old at consummation. But here's where it gets interesting. This particular narration is almost exclusively traced back to one source, Hisham ibn Urwa, and he only began narrating it after he moved to Iraq. He had lived in Medina for 71 years before moving to Iraq and did not make this statement until he was 90 years old. Not only did his memory reportedly decline in Iraq, but Medina scholars who knew Hisham earlier didn't report this version of Ayesha's age. Even Imam Malik, who was a peer of Hashims when he lived in Medina and one of the most rigorous early scholars, does not have such a narration in his own work Al-Mawatba. So that raises some serious questions about its reliability. Additionally, later scholars like Ibn Hajj al-Athebih also noted that Hisham's reports from Iraq had issues with reliability due to loss of memory and confusion in his old age. So the source of this narration doesn't have the weight that we might think. Similar hadith also recorded in Bukhari are narrated by men who are similarly reliable narrators who became unreliable in their later years. For example, Ali ibn Mushir al-Kufi. In short, all narrations about Ayesha's age in Sahih al-Buhari come from Iraq, and most narrators involved were considered Mu'dal-Iseem, meaning they engaged in Todliz, obscuring the source of narration by traditionalist's own standards. This significantly impacts the reliability of these reports. Okay, now let's consider Ayesha's age based on key life events. Historian Muhammad ibn Ishaq and other early sources like Ibn Hisham and Ibn Khathir, list Ayesha as part of the very first group of people to accept Islam in the first year of the Prophet SalAllahu Alaihi Wasallam's mission. Now, if Ayesha accepted Islam as a young child in the first year, she couldn't have been six years old when her marriage was officiated as some suggest. Here's the timeline issue. The Prophet SalAllahu Alaihi Wasallam stayed in Makkaf 13 years after his mission began, then another year and a half passed after the Hejira, after the migration to Medina, before his marriage with Ayesha. So if she joined Islam at the very start, and to do so, she needs to have had the sense to know she was converting to a new faith. In other words, she couldn't have been too young in the first place. She'd have been in her late teens by the marriage, definitely not six or nine. Now, Artabari adds a further evidence by saying all of Abu Bakr, Ayesha's father, all of Abu Bakr's kids, including Ayesha, were born before Islam. If she was born pre-Islam, she'd have been around 16 at her engagement, and a bit older when she joined the Prophet SalAllahu Alaihi Wasallam's household by 18. Alabari also reported that at the time that Abu Bakr had the Alaha and who planned to migrate to Habsha to Ethiopia, which was eight years before Hejira, he went to Mudam, whose son Ayesha was engaged to, and asked him to take Ayesha in his house as his son's wife. But Mudam refused because Abu Bakr had embraced Islam, and his family had not, and so they broke off the engagement. Now, if Ayesha was only six years old at the time of her marriage, she could not have even been born when Abu Bakr decided to migrate to Habsha to Ethiopia. Then there's her sister Asma. We know from historians that Asma was ten years older than Ayesha. Asma died, aged 100 years old in the year 73 after Hejira. So if we do the calculations, that means that she was 27 years old at the time of Hejira, which would have made Ayesha at that time 17. And that's way more consistent with Ayesha having the maturity and responsibilities we read about in her early years in Medina as well. All in all, the maths just doesn't add up for Ayesha to have been six or nine, and the sources, the timelines and the context really point to her being older. And if that's not enough, there's the issue of interpreting cultural language, meaning there's also the idea that Ayesha's age could have been described with a cultural figure of speech. Now the Bhagasani scholar Javed Ahmed Ramadi suggests that when Ayesha said six, as is recorded in Bukhari, it might have actually meant 16, as shorthand was common in Arabic speech. Now we see the Prophet Sallam using similar phrasing, actually, in describing the night of power, Leila Turtadar, as one of the last ten days of Ramadan, when He said to seek it out on the ninth, seventh and fifth in the Arabic. But no one ever disputes that this is understood to mean 29th, 27th and 25th. So it's very possible that six and nine in these narrations could hold symbolic or contextual meanings that don't translate directly. And these are just some of the historical and contextual arguments. The discussion around Ayesha's age isn't just about numbers, it's about understanding Islamic values of consent, maturity and compassion in marriage. We have a moral obligation to reinvestigate claims like these when ignoring them means there are people in the world who will continue to cite Ayesha's age to justify child marriage or argue some sort of cultural relativism on what constitutes a child in Islam.

Here's the transcript of the other one:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DJAEcZKIUc2/

Remember how Muhammad Mary died when she was six years old? Well, let me tell you a little secret. It's not true. I got a really interesting email this morning about this. So I thought I'd address it because it's not only islamophobic. It's also been used in political systems to justify the lowering of the legal age of marriage. But let me tell you something about Islam. Unless it's in the Quran, then it doesn't escape infallibility. Quran alone is the infallible word of God. And in the Quran, marriage is only legitimate when it is entered by two consenting adults. And more importantly, it's the woman who gets to choose her spouse. Now, in a time like the fifth and sixth century in the Saudi Arabian desert, there was no such thing as a birth registry or celebrating a birthday. So people just basically estimated their own age. A person was considered an adult once they passed through puberty. And by the way, 500 years after Muhammad, that was still true in Europe, which is why it was okay for the 35 year old King John of England to marry an 11 year old Isabella of Angulam. But here's the thing. This image of the corrupt sinful philandrous Muhammad fits perfectly inside a broader islamophobic orientalism. It's giving crusades. The Catholic church did everything in its power to paint this image of a sinful lustful false prophet. They had done all the work to create this immaculate image of a perfect Messiah, Jesus Christ, Son of God. The guy was born of a virgin for God's sake. So by extension, the religion of this sinful philanderer Islam stood no chance against the religion of the archetype of celibacy. So ultimately we get these ideas from threatened Christian patriarchs. But let me tell you some more interesting stuff about Muhammad that we actually know. Because it's really funny how we always rush to talk about how we married a six year old. But we never talk about his first wife. The one we actually know was his wife. And who very interestingly was the first Muslim. Her name was Khadija. And she was a business owner when Muhammad still had nothing in his own name. She had heard of his journey into the cave. He had come to her seeking solace after the vision. She was 15 years his senior. He was 25, she was 40. And she proposed to him. She actually sent her friend to ask him if he would be okay being with a woman who had her own money. It was a whole thing, it's super cute, go read about it. But let's circle back to Aisha. Because when Khadija passed away, Muhammad was heartbroken. But he was friends with a man named Abu Bakr, who had a daughter that was coming of age. And because marriage in those days typically served political and social functions, Muhammad was wed to Aisha to solidify his relationship with Abu Bakr. And guess what? Aisha was no wallflower. She led troops in battle and was known for her temper and her mischievous sense of humor. She was a state's woman, scholar, Mufti and judge. And this whole Islamophobic narrative that paints her as some kind of victim is honestly just an insult to one of the most powerful women in Islam. Aisha, Aisha,