Aisha was betrothed at 7 , and at 9 or 10 the marriage was consummated. Mohammed was 53.
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She was definitely young but itās wild to think people know exact age from way back then. Especially with a young girl.
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And letās not forget that European royalty was marrying girls off at the sign of their first pube.
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Why ? I think most people know how a nine year old looks.
We donāt have any genuinely reliable record of those times. The Koran is very different from the Bible, despite being frequently compared - it is in no way telling a narrative the way the Old and New Testaments do. Most of what is known about Mohammed and those around him in his life comes from narratives that were set down over 200 years after the events based on oral histories.
To take a simple example, the Battle of Qadisaya broke Sassanid power and led to the collapse of a major world power. The tradition holds that it happened in 636, but there is quite a bit of evidence that it was a year later, and may even have been in 638. If we are +/- 2 years on a major world event, relying on oral histories captures two centuries after the event for the precise age of a girl is probably not sound.
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Thereās a bit of a deep dive here into the veracity of the claim. Although it left me none the wiser , what is probably more pertinent (with reference to the original post about Iraq lowering the age of marriage) is the point made in the conclusion ;
āAlthough the Aisha hadith was produced for sectarian reasons, it would soon thereafter be used in a legal capacity to defend early marriage and circumvent the religious mandate ā also narrated in the hadith literature! ā necessitating a femaleās consent for marriage. Today, we may say the Aisha hadith has long since lost its original sectarian purpose and is now only used to defend the legality of child marriage. For this reason, many reformist Muslims will welcome Littleās conclusions and use them to push back against fundamentalist clerics who defend child marriage.ā
tl;dr - There is no mention of her age in the original Hadith. The 9yr old claim came 800 yrs later in another Hadith (In Iraq co-incidentally) and was thought to have been added due to sectarian reasons. i.e. the Shia / Sunni schism.
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Thanks for looking that up. Didnāt know about this.
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Yes itās the bare minimum research weāve come to expect on this āfootballā board
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Thatās why I love it. If I wanted to see only mindless drivel Iād go to the Xhitter.
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No surprise there.
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Expect it to get worse with the incoming administration. But hey Dearborn, you knew what you were voting for, eh?
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Weād do well to focus on our own government. Our prime minister is a Zionist scum bag
https://x.com/garyspedding/status/1856677077929370101?s=46&t=Tk6buFVfyHeITdfFRWCVMg
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I think the second characterisation is a personal judgement, but I donāt see how you read Zionist from that. It is a dodge of an answer though, and it goes back to the question I originally had a while back in this thread. How much influence does the UK have in Israel? If the UK has a lot more to lose than it can realistically hope to gain by trying to leverage its influence on Israel, particularly with the stance of both the outgoing and the incoming administrations in the USA, then whatās in it for the UK government?
He could privately be all for a free Palestinian state according to the Oslo Accords, or even maybe think the creation of Israel is a historical travesty (doubt it though), but it doesnāt matter if itās not in the interests of the United Kingdom, like it or not.
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What you have said is the same handwashing that the international community have been doing for the past year. Their silence is complicity, never mind actually arming the fucking genocide.
As Khan stated the UK have presidency of the security council. Starmer has a lot more influence than most but is too scared to upset those who got him into power and keep him there.
His reply is literally propaganda from the Knesset itself. You canāt talk about the genocide without first highlighting October 7th, and there are no red lines, no human rights, no amount of dead children that canāt be justified because of October 7th.
Your reply has properly shocked and angered me though I understand it probably reflects what others think. Going to step away from the thread rather than get into a row
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Iām not opposed to your point, and my question was genuine. What does the UK have in leverage over the government of Israel? If it doesnāt have much leverage, what can it do?
How does that position translate into power and leverage?
Maybe. And perhaps my short reply on what he said was insufficient to emphasise that it completely ignores the very important point that what is going on there can meet the definition of genocide.
But the question is, if you were Starmer, and you had little leverage over Netanyahu and his government, but risk a lot to lose by being tarred as antisemitic, what would you do?
I donāt like it, but it is what it is. We can argue non-stop, but unless there can be a coordinated international effort to make Israel a pariah state (which I doubt is possible) because of the other geopolitical issues going on, there is nothing a responsible government can do, as much of an absolute disgrace to humanity as that is.
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Yeah, Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel is not a good sign. He is openly supportive of removing the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and has been for years.
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Isnāt he one of the crazy evangelicals?
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Depends on your definition. He has called on Israel to annex all of Judea and Samaria while leading Bible toursā¦
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Yeah, notably he was an early adopter of that language in the US. Language is important because it frames the mental models we have of a situation. It is kind of chilling that the point of this is to linguistically eliminate the entire concept of the West Bank because then makes it far easier to do it for real.
This is a take from a former State Department official
https://x.com/LuisMorenolg/status/1856415792050344366
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Basically, heās one of those who believes that helping Israel eradicate (and I really do mean eradicate) Palestine will bring about the Second Coming?
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