Is this hadith true and reliable

[Introvert98]

From the hadith of the Sunan of Abu Dawud, volume 2, #2116

"Aisha said, "The Apostle of Allah married me when I was seven years old." (The narrator Sulaiman said: "Or six years.". "He had intercourse with me when I was 9 years old."

[QuranSearchCom]

As'salamu Alaikum,

Me personally, I am not sure about Aisha's age.  But assuming that she was 6 when the Prophet married her, and 9 when the Prophet consummated the marriage with her, this still doesn't refute anything, because we have worse in the Bible.  Plus, in the USA, the State of Delaware had the minimum age at 7 up until the early 1900s.  Also countless US states had the minimum age as 10.  Please visit:

www.answering-christianity.com/aisha.htm

Take care,
Osama Abdallah

[AhmadFarooq]

Although there have been many arguments by Muslims to show that Lady Aisha's age was not 6 and 9 at marriage, I personally have found them to be refuted by other Muslim scholars. There are many narrations which talk about this event. Saying that, there still do remain some logical problems with the whole narrative.

At the age of 50 when Prophet Muhammad had lost his wife Khadija, the Prophet was very distressed at that time and had the responsibilities of his children at his house. At this time a woman Khawlah bint Hakeem came to the Prophet and told him that he should get married, for which she gave the names of Aisha (who was not previously married) and Sawda bint Zama (who had been previously married).

It is argued that the marriage was supposed to be an immediate relief for the Prophet. In which case there was no logical reason to present the name of a six year old Aisha on this occasion. Even by the standards of 7th century Arabia, where puberty was taken as the threshold for maturity, a six-year old Aisha could not have had marital relations with the Prophet, couldn't have provided any emotional support to him nor could have taken care of the Prophet's children who were at that time apparently older than six.

In Arabic language the numerical figures are, after ten, made of two words similar to in English (for example, the figure 22 is made of "twenty-two"). Some Muslims argue that the word for ten (Ashra) from these historical narratives got lost during the decades/centuries of these events being recorded and because in 7th century Arabian society there wasn't much of a problem with such narratives, these were accepted. Because of the fact when something of a religious nature gets accepted in Muslim societies it gets deeply ingrained in it, such was the case for this incident too.

Whatever may have been the case, taking all the evidence into account holistically, it can be reasonably argued that the Prophet consummated the marriage with a physically, socially and psychologically mature lady; the definition of ‘mature’ being one that was followed in most of the world for at-least up-to the 18th century.

http://www.muhaddith.org/earlymarriage/EarlyMarriage-part1.html
http://www.muhaddith.org/earlymarriage/EarlyMarriage-part2.html