muhammad was a pedophile?
I keep hearing this from people.
I don't believe in muhammad or anyone else but i want to know why i keep hearing this.
Sunni doctrine is that Aisha was nine or ten when Mohammed consummated his marriage with her. Since a pedophile is defined as someone with a compulsion to have sex with children, and none of his other wives were so young, and his senior wife was older than him, and such marriages were within cultural norms back then, even in Christian Europe, a formal diagnosis if pedophilia seems untenable.
As to whether the story is true or not, there's no particular reason to believe Sunni doctrine over Shia. The Shiites put her at maybe eight to ten years older, maybe over 20. The reasons for the different estimates are political: The Sunni want to make Aisha seems astonishingly pure, and they do that by making her younger, therefore it is more miraculous that Mohammed's teachings were spread through her. Shia want to discredit her and support Mohammed's teachings through someone else, so their interest is in making her seem 'less pure' by making her older and her deeds therefore more ordinary.
There's no good reason to think anyone really knows the exact of age of Moahmmed's youngest wife when their marriage was consummated. Deciding to believe he was a pedophile seems mostly for the sake of having a club to bash Muslims with. It would be much more constructive to argue that Aisha was older if your goal is to persuade Muslims in certain countries where it's legal to give up child marriage.
