re: #889 sagehen

Actually, it’s debatable whether he had sex with Aisha. Marriage as a contractual arrangement between families often took place when the bride was too young for anyone to call her a woman — they’d live in the same household, and wait years before consummation.

BTW, Are you aware that King David (the guy we celebrate in story and song, author of the Psalms) had dozens of “wives”, many of whom he “married” within a few hours of picking them up at their husbands’ funerals? The text isn’t always clear how consensual those “marriages” were, but I could make a guess based on how often Davy was directly, personally responsible for those husbands being in need of a funeral. His immediate predecessor (father-in-law Saul) was no better. Neither was our wisest, King Solomon.

Of course it’s debatable whether Muhammad had sex with Aisha. The question is, what do the most authoritative Islamic sources say about it? Like Bukhari, who writes “”the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old.” And like Al-Tabari, who quotes Aisha as having said, “my marriage was consummated when I was nine.”

I don’t really care what King David did. Judaism does not call out King David as the role model of the perfect human for all time, while the Qur’an does say that (33.21), and Abdul-Rauf recently affirmed that in an interview:

You see, Muslims have an ideal. Part of their ideal is to follow what they call the example of the prophet, the Sunna of the prophet. So at an individual level, a human being who wants to perfect himself or herself looks to the tradition of the prophet, his individual practice, and tries to emulate the prophet as much as possible.

pbs.org

Let me know when you find a Jew saying the same thing about King David.