sardab wrote:Aburaees wrote:
Yes, it is clear that the Qur'an commands marriage to women and not girls, and Muhammad would therefore have only married or stayed married to women.
I'm just trying to find out whether Islam confers womanhood on a female of 9 years old.
If Islam can confer womanhood on a 9 year old, there would be no contradiction between the Qur'an's ruling (marrying nisaa'a) and Muhammad's practice (marrying a 9 year old).
Loki says in Jewish law minimum age for marriage is 12 and strangely claims that it is for certain that girls hit puberty at that age. Puberty is a biological thing indeed but 12 is not certain age in any way. It depends and yes it is not related to culture , but it has something to do with geography and climate.
Back to your question, we cannot infer from these hadiths that girls can be married as low as 9 as if age is the criterion. These hadiths has problems in isnad and they contradict with other hadiths. So I will further look for how hadith scholars handled these hadith and write it here.
But another way we can do this inference is how these reflected in Muslim life. Muslims never thought a girl can be married as low as 9, age being the only criterion. Instead the common knowledge is that a girl hits puberty when she sees her first periods, and a boy hits puberty when he experiences ejaculation in his sleep.
Such boys and girls qualify for marriage physically. But usually Muslims will not let their children marry at the edge of puberty. They will wait for a little more, as Muhammad waited for 2-3 years before consummation of marriage.
That would explain why Hisham's Hadiths are unreliable, but what about the Hadith narrated by Aisha where she talks about her own marriage?
The hadiths go like "narrated Aisha bint Abubakr, narrated Urwa bin Zubayr, narrated Hisham bin Urwa..." In isnad they go back to Aisha.
No other person from Madina other than Hisham narrated these, as if Aisha told these only to Urwa and Urwa told these only to Hisham.