Imagine yourself as a 50 year old man on a mission, in the deserts of Australia, a thousand years back.
You have single handedly challenged the entire social-economic-political-religious system of your nation.
Your community is mad at you for what you are doing.
For 10 years or so, you are fighting against all odds with no signs of any breakthrough in your mission.
You have staked your life on a mission that no one believes in! Only a handful of people believe in you.
Amongst them, your wife and your dear (paternal) uncle.
Your wealthy wife being the first person to believe in you and support you morally and financially.
When your people are thirsting for your blood, your uncle, an influential leader of the nation, keeps you protected from them. He provides you amnesty that is crucial for your mission and for your personal safety.
And then, in a sudden befalling of calamitous events, both your wife and uncle die in the same year.
You are devastated beyond repair.
To make matters worse, you have kids at home. While your safety and your mission have been compromised by the two losses; now your family life, your emotional wellbeing, and your children too are at a risk like never before.
Your well wishers recognize your pathetic situation and suggest that you get married so that you get emotional support, your children get a matriarchal figure and a caretaker, and the home gets a homemaker.
So then, a matchmaker presents to you two options as prospective wives:
A fifty something widow.
And a six year old girl!
Wait! What?!!? A six year old girl as a prospective bride! What on earth will a six year old wife be good for! What emotional, moral, logistical support will a six year old provide to you in the most tragic and dangerous times of your life?!!?
The person who suggested a six year old to be your wife must have been crazy to say the least!
Now switch the roles. Come to the point. Put the Prophet Muhammad in your place. Relocate from the deserts of Australia a thousand years back to the deserts of Arabia a 1400 years back where the Prophet was single handedly going against the whole of Arabia and its social-economic-political-religious systems with his claim that God was sending down the Quran upon him.
So now in your wife’s place is the Prophet’s wife Khadijah.
Your uncle gets transposed to Abu Talib, the Prophet’s uncle.
Does it make sense that as a troubled fifty year old missionary, after losing Khadijah and Abu Talib, the rocks supporting the Prophet and his mission, he would have married a six year old girl?!!? Instead of being a support, a six year old wife would be more of a burden and headache to say the least!
Therefore, the matchmaker, whose name was Khawlah, could NOT have, in her right mind, suggested the six year old Aishah as a prospective wife. NOT A CHANCE!
This is reason enough to consider that Aishah couldn’t have been six at the time of her marriage to the Prophet.
But how to know that she was 16 instead of six? I mean, how do we get to the number 16 from the number 6?
That requires another round of historical analyses. I’ll take this up in the next article.
But then, if the case is so clear, why and how did the reports in the much venerated hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim come to mention the number six?
The answer to this disturbing question calls for a critical study of the nature of hadith transmissions. This too, I’ll cover in my subsequent article(s).
Keep reading!