Societies norms of sexual relationships and family life are in a state of continual change. Living in the 21st century, we find that these changes that used to be slow and gradual in the past are gaining more and more speed.

In most of the so-called civilized countries, family values seem to have lost all worth for most people. In the post World War II generation of the United States, 80 percent of children grew up in a family with both the parents. Now that number has dipped to 60 percent or more. Before declining slightly in recent years, divorce rates had soared more than 30 percent since 1970. Today nearly half of American marriages are projected to end in divorce or permanent separation. Nearly half of people between ages 25 and 40 at some point have lived with a member of the opposite sex outside of marriage.

Ninety percent of women born between 1933 and 1942 were virgins when they married; now over half of all teenage girls in the United States have sexual intercourse with some man before age 17. More dramatically, the percentage of teen girls who said that having a child out of wedlock is a worthwhile lifestyle rose from 33 to 53 in the past two decades. And what about same-sex marriage? It is being accepted even by the conservatives and the clergymen as perfectly normal. Such findings lead many people to conclude that the institution of marriage is in serious trouble.

What is the right age for Marriage?

To speak of the age of consent for women in the United States: A 20-year-old woman who marries in Nebraska breaks the law because there the age of consent is 21, while a woman in Alabama can legally marry at that age, as the age of consent there is only 18. A hundred years ago, under the common law in the United States, the age of consent was just 10 years. Ancient Jewish law permitted girls to be wives at a much younger age. In ancient India girls as young as five and six were married to much older men. Even now the practice continues among some Hindus.

The foregoing shows that the minimum age for girls to be married varies from culture to culture and from age to age. Against this background, there seems to be no point in holding a particular age as the right age of consent in the post-modern world. But people who want to impose one on a different culture or religion would make it a big issue. It is surprising how even the intellectuals show a tendency to judge others by their own culture-specific standards as though these should be accepted universally binding on the whole of mankind!

This is not to argue that today girls should be married off at nine or ten years, for no one can ignore that the times, the social conditions, and the cultural milieu have undergone immense changes. But the very same fact should help us to realize that in another age and in another cultural setting, marrying a girl at the age of nine was quite the norm and there could be nothing surprising about that.

Marriages of the Prophets

The events of the Prophets life (as also is the case of the lives of other prophets of the past) should be interpreted in the light of the socio-historical conditions of the times. What people often miss is the absurdity of trying to assess an event of sixth century Arabia, as though it happened the other day in downtown Manhattan or Birmingham.

It is worth stating here that it was Abu Bakr, the father of `Aishah, who gave her in marriage to Muhammad (peace be upon him), and that she remained a faithful and loving wife until death parted her from her husband. And of the wives of the Prophet, none was so mature and knowledgeable as `Aishah (may Allah be pleased with her).

Deliberate misrepresentation

The enemies of Islam have always been working on the Prophet's private life as being the Achilles's heel of our religion that we have to be ashamed of and keep defending or rather apologizing for throughout our lives!

The source of confusion in understanding this issue of the Prophet's marriages is that we judge a 7th century style of life with a 21st century criterion. At the Prophet's time and environment - Arab Peninsula - it was a normal thing for a man to marry an unlimited number of wives plus taking an unlimited number of women slaves. Then, when Islam was revealed, it restricted the number to only four wives, girls can not be forced into marriage, must reach puberty, plus encouraging people to free slaves.

All Muslims had to abide with this divine command. Thus, they kept only four wives and divorced the rest. The situation for the Prophet was quite different as he was the only one allowed to keep his marriages. This was for one simple reason that his wives were not allowed to marry after him. Therefore, it would be inhuman for those noble ladies to stay the rest of their lives unmarried, while most of them were in their teenage, twenties or thirties.

It is true that each of those marriages was for a certain reason, either to honor a friend by marrying his daughter - in case of `A'isha and Hafsa - or to help a wretched woman...

The way he married a 9-year-old girl was not out of the norms of both time and place, specially when you know that the girls of this region - desert - till now reach their puberty in an early time - nine and ten years old. So it was not an act of harassment to `A'isha or violation of her innocence, but it was a norm that would put a girl to shame if she waited any longer after this age without getting married. Notice that her sister Asmaa was married to Az-Zubayr at the age of eleven, and so did most of the girls at that time without even considering the age gap between the bride and groom.

Actually, there was a need for the Prophet to marry a girl at this age, in order to live long after his death to teach people lessons from his private life that only a wife would have witnessed. Thus, his many marriages and his marriage to a young girl were not something weird or to be ashamed of or even apologized for, from the criterion of his time as it may be now.