My temptation, when I came across it, was to snap her biography shut in disgust. Islam’s detractors have done that for centuries, dismissing the marriage between the fifty-year-old Muhammad and the little girl as pedophilia. But to shut the book, so to speak, would reduce Aisha to merely being a bride. To focus only on her age at marriage, rather than what came after it, I’d miss the best bits of the story, the ones that add tone and texture, not just to the marriage, but to Aisha herself. For the child bride grows into a heroine for grown-ups. After the Prophet’s death, when the jousting
...more
