Sectarian Tensions, Islamophobia, and Decolonialization: Comparing Jasser Auda’s and Jonathan Brown’s Analysis of the Hadiths Concerning Aisha’s Marital Age

Abstract

The ongoing debate surrounding the hadiths on Aisha’s age of marriage has given rise to two main positions among Muslim scholars, namely: the rejectors, those who reject the hadiths’ validity and propose the view that Aisha got married at an older age, and the defenders, those who defend them as valid hadiths and accept that Aisha consummated her marriage at the early age of nine years old. In this study, we examine this issue through the opposing arguments offered by two contemporary Muslim scholars: Jasser Auda, who represents the view of hadith rejectors, and Jonathan Brown, who represents those who accept the validity of the hadiths. These two scholars have been chosen to represent these two standpoints mainly because of their novel and distinctive theoretical contributions to the ongoing debate. Entangled in this debate is the issue of whether pre-modern reality can be assessed by using modern norms. We investigate the epistemological and methodological aspects surrounding the two scholars' interpretations of the hadiths of Aisha’s age of marriage. We argue that three significant features distinguish Auda and Brown’s dispositions. These are: first, their different conceptions of the interplay between politics, knowledge, and memory; second, their differing epistemological approaches to hadith science; and third, their opposing assumptions about the universality of modern norms.