Hazrat Aisha ka Bachpan mein Nikah

He states the objection before answering it, and states it at its full strength. People today object that the nikah was contracted at six and the rukhsati at nine; the larger objection is that the Prophet ﷺ was fifty-four at the time, so how was a small girl handed to a man of great age, and is that not cruelty to a child? And from this, naʿūdhu billāh, they try to prove that he was self-indulgent.

The piece answers on two fronts at once. It sets out to prove from the hadiths why this marriage took place, and to prove that the Prophet ﷺ was never self-indulgent, but that the marriage happened for eleven great reasons. Fifteen hadiths are brought for it.

The first of the eleven is the one the subtitle on his own title page names, and it turns the objection around by asking who actually wanted the match. After the prophets, he says, there has not been and will not be a lover as true as Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, who gave up everything for the Prophet ﷺ and at the last offered his own small daughter as a gift, which is “easy to say, and very hard indeed to do”. His reading of the motive is this: Abū Bakr had heard the hadith that on the Last Day no lineage and no relationship will be of use except a relationship with the Prophet ﷺ. He saw that he had no such tie, not even through the Prophet’s close family, and asked himself what would become of him. He saw one road: give his own daughter in marriage, and become the Prophet’s father-in-law, which is the best way of entering into that relationship. When the message came, Abū Bakr was delighted; the longing was so intense that the nikah was done two years before the Hijra.

So, he concludes, it should be said that this was not only a marriage but the completion of Abū Bakr’s own longing. And if a father was himself ready for that madness, “and a very good madness it is”, then those of us who have never loved that way have no right to object.

There is a fuller treatment of the same subject on this site, at Nikah-e-Aisha, which is a book rather than an article.