@Debunker
The best of greetings, the best of meetings upon you, my brother/sister in the Faith.
I think that such narrartions are
1- anti-Islamic propaganda fabricated by hypocrites pretending to be Muslims. ...
OR
2- Aicha could have been grossly exaggerating about her age. ..
OR
3- Some deviant (Ummayyad) Caliph had a thing for little girls and had such hadiths invented to justify his behavior.
I am NOT a Quran only Muslim. I simply recognize my right to reject Hadiths from within the work of Bukhari et al, just like they've given themselves the right to reject hundreds of thousands of Hadith...
Thank you for your reply -- it was very helpful. Of course, an implication of point 1) would be that Imam Bukhari himself is a participant in disseminating anti-Islamic propaganda. After all, he used his own judgement to assemble this collection, rejecting some and keeping others. The "guilt" would then presumably dissipate, as future generations of scholars put their trust in his judgement.
This might explain why he was occasionally chased out of the towns he visited -- on charges of heresy from angry local sheikhs.
Of course, no one will really know who Bukhari was, what the precise nature of his judgement was in defining this collection or even precisely why he was unpopular when he visited the towns.
There are a great number of possibilities regarding the identity of this peculiar Imam and the motivation behind his strange and difficult compilation.
In such cases, it is often constructive to to follow Harold Bloom's "creative history" -- for example, in his "Book of J", he "imagines" that the author of the J fragment of Torah was a woman in the court of Solomon -- and Sigmund Freud "imagined" that Moses was an Egyptian mystic who taught the Jews monotheism but was then killed by them, an event they subsequently repressed in the book of Torah itself. These wild speculations are made blatantly -- but are actually just as valid as any other, more sedate (and boring) speculation, as we really will never know the actual history of events ...
And so I say that, coming from the town of Bukhara, a melting pot of Jewish Mysticism and Central Asian Shamanism, Imam Bukhari (like his father) was in fact a converted Jew, who set out to gather into one collection something along same lines as the Talmudic hadiths developed in the aftermath of previous prophets. On his travels, he came across many initiates into the Secret of the Abrahamic lineage -- converted Kabbalists and Ebionite Gnostics, in particular -- who supplied him with their Difficult Tafsir of Prophecy. Some had a direct contact with Prophecy and the Sahaba -- others had a "direct" (Uwaisi) contact with Prophecy and the (theomorphic) Sahaba -- but nonetheless, all the hadiths Imam Bukhari are authentic chains of transmission.
All the crazy stuff that perplexed the uneducated masses of Islamic scholars that followed -- from stuff about witchcraft made on Muhammed to make him hallucinate sexual relations with his wives, to the truth of children resembling their mother or father depending on discharge, to Musa's scrotal hernia problems, to flies dipped in drink to cause and cure disease, to 9 year old marriages -- are messages that employ a near IDENTICAL idiom to that found in Talmud and Kabbalah. Bukhari's ancestors taught him this idiom, and his choices in compilation were guided by this Gnosis.
This is not to say there is no new Wisdom to be found within the narrations -- or that they are a simple cut-and-paste job. Like the Qur'an itself, they amplify the knowledge that came before, but add a final movement of reflection and differentiation necessary for what a friend of mine in a different forum referred to as a post-modern awakening -- an awakening that has not yet come fully in fact, but that will come from this strange time capsule.
I can't prove any of this -- and am not even claiming it to be an historical fact at all. It's just a story (like the hadiths themselves) that is meant to jog one's mind to the fact that all is not as it seems.
But I've been to Bukhara, seen the ancient Synagogues, participated in Central Asian shamanism: and had a grasp of the crazy climate from which he came. Much further away from Wahabi Saudi A, and more like 1990s rave culture, in its combination of shamanist posturing and the possibility of a New way of externalising the infinite possibilities of our internal reality ... but the difference being -- the language Bukhari had learnt was one (like my story about Bukhari) that was "imaginary" (not historical), providing a way to enter into this space ...
I don't know where did you get that the Hebrew rule set the minimum age for marriage at 12? The majority of Jewish scholars agree that Rebecca married 40 years old Isaac when she was 10 years old. Other Jewish scholars think Rebecca was *3* years old when she married Issac.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=146&letter=RI'm glad you brought this up. The link to our discussion (and my blog piece) on the age of Aisha is important ... I don't expect anyone to follow what I will say here -- apart from grasping that there is an alternative way of reading this stuff -- a Sufi understanding. The general Rabbinic consensus is 12 -- for the same reason that, in Kabbalistic understanding, the Woman takes 12 months to be born, while Men take 9 months (although Moses was 7). Aisha took 9 years, and so was premature -- hence theomorphically, she is imbalanced toward "Judgement" and "Law" -- if she was married at 12, she would be balanced (a complete Feminine) to "Love" as well as "Law". Her imbalance caused her to engage in the fitnah -- and also is the reason why so much Shariah derives from her. In a way, she IS Shariah to the Prophet. Nevertheless, despite the problems that resulted from her imbalance, we are told she was the best of women of her generation, and Prophecy dies in her arms. Why? Because, while he was alive, she was able to contain his Nur through 9 phases, though being premature and not yet 12. Shariah (the virtual reality of our existence) is able to contain the Nur of Muhammed -- this has been proven in Aisha's age at marriage. But -- the story of the fitnah must not be ignored -- we are all premature proto-Aishas, and need to become 12 years in order to finally reconcile and awaken the Global Message of Islam.
(Didn't I tell you that I am loco?)
Love and Light,
The Tailor
Topic: Mohammad, the Pedophile