The marriage of Aisha

I'm regularly reminded again of James Baldwin. There's a there's a speech that you can hear from him when he was at the press club in Washington DC, and he was talking about how, in America and in the West, he was talking specifically about America, but it sort of applies throughout the West, That you think simplicity, simple mindedness is a virtue, and you are distrustful of complexity. You're distrustful of nuance. You're distrustful of anything that is hard to understand or that that can't be understood in five seconds. You know, you always wanna get to the bottom line.

Never mind whether or not whatever is at the bottom line can only be understood when you read the whole page. The marriage of Aisha. Right. That's the favorite talking point, you know. It's like when all else fails in their arguments against Islam, they bring up child marriage.

The marriage of to Aisha. It's like the the last stone that you have to throw in your hand. The silver bullet, your prophet married a child. Okay. With all of these types of comments and questions, and and in this one, there's an incredible amount of deviousness going on here.

When people ask this, I know what they're up to. And it also it it it also reveals the extent to which the western culture has alienated people from basic understanding about being humans. So in the West, they constantly need to be told what's moral or immoral by means of laws and regulations. Even if those laws and regulations, you know, change arbitrarily on a regular basis, and even though those laws, oddly enough, are being written by the least trusted people in the society. I mean, politicians, the politicians who make these laws are regularly regarded in polling by the public as the least trusted and least moral people in the society.

But when they say something is illegal, you take it as a moral absolute. Illegal means immoral. And when they legalize something, it means it's morally fine. You take your fatwas on morality, from your politicians even though you don't trust them as far as you could throw them. But why would you do that?

The reason you do that is because you trust yourself even less. You trust the politicians on morality more than you trust yourself, and you trust your neighbors even less than you trust yourself. You don't trust that you have enough moral sense to make the right decision on your own. So you defer to politicians in Washington who you yourself regard as criminals. You defer to them to tell you right from wrong.

So because you don't have enough sense, or anyway, you don't have enough trust in your sense to, for example, evaluate the maturity level of young people, you said that everyone is a child until they turn 18. Means that someone could literally be just one day shy of their eighteenth birthday, but they're a child all the way up until midnight. And then poof, suddenly they're an adult when the clock strikes twelve. Obviously, doesn't make any sense to anyone, but you need a standard. You need a rule because without it, you wouldn't trust your own common sense.

This is a breakdown of moral reason in the West and of human understanding. And it shows that in fact you can't be trusted to do the right thing. You can't be trusted to make the distinction between who is a a mature person and who is an immature person. Someone who is a actually a vulnerable, inexperienced child from someone who is, you know, a responsible person with a full cognition and agency. Even though we all know that there are people who are younger than 18 who are more mature than some 30 year olds, and there are some 30 year olds who are less mature than teenagers.

But okay. You need a standard. You need some help on that issue because apparently your own sense isn't sufficient. And apparently, can't be trusted to raise your own children right or to protect them properly, from predators. And then because you, legalized fornication, you know, you decided that sex outside of marriage is moral now, then you had to decide on a legal age of consent.

And then you had to figure out what you're supposed to do when someone who's above the legal age of consent has sex with someone who's below the legal age of consent. And then you also had to figure out what to do when two people who are under the age of consent have sex with each other. Basically, you had to figure out all the rules for fornication. And, of course, all of this is arbitrary. But throughout most of the West, none of that applies to marriage because you still have child marriage throughout the, the Western world, the same as everywhere else.

I mean, marriage is legal in almost half of the, states in America. In some states, you need parental, consent, and in some states, there's not even a minimum age. It's the same in Europe. So you don't want adults and minors to fornicate with each other, but it's okay if they marry each other. That's your position.

I mean, there's been about half a million marriages between adults and minors in The United States in just the last couple of decades. So, basically, the age of consent, the legal age, of adulthood is only really relevant in terms of the, legalities surrounding fornication because you don't actually have an issue with child marriage. It's legal throughout. We can say most of the West or at least half or three quarters of the West has no problem with child marriage. But we all know that you're much more interested in fornication than you're interested in marriage.

So when you talk about the marriage of Rasulullah to Aisha, you're looking at it from the sexual angle. Even though this was a marriage and you have legal marriage in your societies between adults and minors, what you're looking for from us, this is what you're up to. What you're looking for from us is a defense, a moral defense for sex between adults and minors. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to trick us into normalizing pedophilia for you.

Because when you bring up Aisha, you know that Muslims will jump to explain that she was menstruating. You know? She was physically, biologically mature enough for intercourse. And we'll explain how this kind of a marriage was perfectly normal in traditional societies and has been historically all the way up until really the twentieth century. And we'll provide you with all of the arguments that you need to make it okay for you to have sex with children.

That's what you really want. That's why you talk about it. You're outsourcing the task of justifying pedophilia to the Muslims so that you can use those arguments to rationalize fornicating with children. That's all it can be because like I said, you have legal child marriages in the West. So you're just interested in the sex part because, again, you have decided collectively that what used to only be allowed between married people should also be allowed between unmarried people.

You decided that sex inside of marriage and outside of marriage are equally valid. So now you want to apply that to sex between adults and minors because it's obviously okay inside of a marriage by your own laws, most of the most of Europe and most of the West. So it should also be okay outside of marriage. That's what you're up to. But no.

Sorry. We're not going to normalize pedophilia for you. In Islam, we do not allow marriage between a mature person and an immature person, and maturity isn't exclusively physical or biological. Aisha was not comparable to anyone her age, not in her time period and not now. She was a remarkable human being.

She was a remarkable person. She's what today you would call a prodigy. She was an exception in every conceivable way, strong, mature, gifted, with extraordinary character and wisdom. Like, Mariam, the mother of Isa, Mary, the mother of Jesus. She was an anomaly.

Obviously, was physically mature. She was menstruating when she married Rasulullah, she was also psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually mature. She's one of the greatest scholars and jurists in Islamic history. This was not an average human being. And beyond that, she was not marrying an average human being, and her parents weren't average.

There is nothing in this scenario that applies to, you know, some guy in The Netherlands who wants to have sex with a child. There's a complex architecture in Islam around marriage and all of it has to be in place for it to be valid in order for it to be approved. You can't just look at the age of Aisha and conclude from that, oh, it's it's it's okay. It's fine to to marry a minor, much less it's okay to have sex with a minor outside of marriage. No.

Contracting marriage in Islam is an elaborate procedure. It's like a math problem. You can't skip any steps and get the same outcome. Again, is your problem in the West. You wanna take some things and then leave other things.

You oversimplify. And in doing so, skip over all of the requirements that make something valid, but you still want the thing to be valid. It doesn't work that way. And because you are so far removed from normal human understanding, you think that if something is allowed under very specific, very unique conditions, it means it's just allowed period. No.

No Muslim father is going to approve for his daughter to marry someone when she's not, physically or emotionally or psychologically ready for that. Do you think we don't love our children? You can't come to a Muslim man and ask to marry his primary school age daughter by telling him that the prophet married Aisha at that age. He'll beat you within an inch of your life. No.

Sorry. You can't use us, to rationalize your kinks and fetishes and sexual deviance. We know that maturity levels vary among young people. It varies by from culture to culture, from upbringing to upbringing, from family to family, and from individual to individual. And we don't force upon, our understanding a fixed age that arbitrarily demarcates adulthood because we have a whole moral, ethical, and legal architecture around marriage to ensure that everyone's rights are safeguarded.

And as for sex outside of marriage, well, obviously, that's not even an option in Islam. But none of this applies to you. None of this applies to your culture. You don't have that architecture. You don't have those safeguards and protections.

You don't have our system. And of course, you don't raise your children the way we do. I mean, a nine year old boy in Gaza is more of a man than a 25 year old in America. You prolong adolescence to an absurd degree. You don't prioritize maturity.

But at the same time, you sexualize your children very early. I mean, you've got like third graders twerking, you know, and singing explicit song lyrics and then you put that on social media for everyone to see. You're teaching kindergartners about sex, masturbation, about homosexuality, and transgenderism. You think that prepubescent children can decide to have their genitals removed before they even know what they're actually for. You put little girls in beauty contests and try to turn them into, you know, miniature Beyonce's and Cardi B singing about WAP.

You need a specific age of consent, and it should be high. It should probably be somewhere in the twenties. In the Muslim world, psychological and emotional maturity is developed as close as possible to physical maturity. So when someone is, biologically capable of procreation, they should be mentally and psychologically capable of the responsibilities that go along with that. And if they're not capable, then marriage is out of the question.

Again, Muslim parents know their children. They love their children. They want what's best for their children. And I would say that we know and love our children and care for our children better than Westerners who very often don't even know what their kids are getting up to. I mean, twelve percent, I saw a study, twelve percent of 12 year olds in The US are already sexually active at 12.

And that's from a study ten years ago. So you can expect that the percentage is even higher now. Six point five percent of them had actually already engaged in anal sex by the age of 12. The majority of sex offenders in the West victimized children, and they say about ninety percent of, sexual assaults on children are never even reported. So imagine what the real numbers are.

No. You have a pedophilia problem in the West. And no matter how much you wish you could, you can't shift that over to us. We're not gonna help you justify your sickness. Islam does not approve of this.

The sharia does not approve of this. The prophet's marriage to Aisha did not give you or anyone else a rationale for praying on vulnerable children because that's not what that marriage was. That marriage demonstrates the specialness of Aisha, the maturity of Aisha, and it showed us that anomalies can exist when someone is, remarkably mature for their age. So we acknowledge the possibility. We acknowledge that that's a thing that can happen.

We have a system for gauging that, and we have, the sense on how to gauge that. And this has nothing to do with people who are, attracted to minors. Rasulullah wasn't attracted to minors. He had multiple wives, and all of them were older previously married women. Aisha was the exception because she was exceptional.

And from that from that example, from their marriage, we understood that exceptions can exist. Very young people can be exceptionally mature and they are treated then accordingly. But people who are specifically attracted to minors are usually attracted to minors precisely because they are immature. They are vulnerable, and they can be manipulated and abused and exploited, and that's what those types of people want to do. And, you know, in in this region, in Southeast Asia, everyone knows about western sex tourists who come over here specifically to target children.

You're notorious for that, especially in Thailand or The Philippines, places like this, Vietnam. Germans, British, Americans, I mean, everyone holds their kids close when they see you all over here, the same way that you hold your kids close when you see a priest. Sexual predation against children has a long history in Europe, the way back to the Roman Empire. You have a pedophilia problem and you always have, and that's exactly why you needed to set an age of consent in the first place to try to control that problem. But you never cured the problem itself in your society.

So now you're actually trying to find ways to get out of those controls that you set. So you want the Muslims to give you a way by explaining the marriage of Aisha according to your framework, according to your context, but it does not apply. In Islam, there is no sex outside of marriage. There is no marriage without consent, and there is no consent without maturity. And if that is ever violated, then it is invalid in the religion.

It is invalid in the law, and that would only ever be done by people who are either ignorant or irreligious. So you wanna cite an example from our history so that you can justify removing the safeguards and conditions that prevent preying on children. But the marriage of Aisha to Rasulullah affirms those safeguards and conditions. So that last stone that you have to throw at us, you know, what you think is that silver bullet when you've got nothing else to say to try to discredit Islam, those accusations just boomerang back around and indict yourselves.