The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: a study in the evolution of early Islamic historical memory

Thesis

This DPhil thesis explores the origins and development of one of the most famous traditions within the Islamic Hadith corpus: the hadith of ʿĀʾišah bt. ʾabī Bakr’s marriage to the Prophet at a young age. To this end, I surveyed all of the modern literature pertaining to the great debate over whether—or to what extent—we can date hadiths and their content, culminating in a defence of a specific—rigorous and systematic—version of the ʾisnād-cum-matn analysis. Thereafter, I collated every available version of every hadith pertaining to this topic and subjected them all to an ʾisnād-cum-matn analysis, which allowed me to reconstruct the underlying urtexts or redactions of various earlier tradents (mostly operating from the mid-to-late 8th Century CE), known as “common links”. I then subjected these common-link redactions to various form-critical, geographical, and historical-critical analyses, which produced a striking conclusion: all versions of the marital-age hadith likely derive a single archetype or ur-hadith. This ur-hadith appears to have been created and disseminated by the Madinan tradent Hišām b. ʿUrwah b. al-Zubayr (d. 146-147/763-765) after he moved to Iraq towards the end of his life, probably as a reaction to local proto-Šīʿī polemics against his great-aunt, ʿĀʾišah. Following on from this, I traced the spread and diversification of the hadith across the early Abbasid Caliphate, including the way in which some Hadith scholars reworked its content and/or replaced the original isnad with local and/or familial isnads, thereby naturalising it in their respective regions. Thereafter, I explored the reception of the hadith by the proto-Sunnī Hadith critics, who rejected or criticised some versions, but accepted others, seemingly without a thorough or systematic investigation of their provenance and transmission. Finally, I explored the broader implications of all of this, including the ways in which my findings variously confirm or disconfirm the conclusions and predictions of other scholars, concerning the authenticity of the marital-age hadith in particular and the historical development of Hadith in general. In short, this thesis tracks the provenance and development of a famous and widespread hadith, from its genesis in the sectarian milieu of mid-8th-Century Iraq, to its spread and diversification across the early Abbasid Caliphate, to its canonisation at the hands of the proto-Sunnī Hadith critics.

Authors: Little, JJ

• DOI: 10.5287/bodleian:RDMAg4qJR
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Isnad-Cum-Matn Analysis; Hadith; common link; Isnad; Aisha; Matn
• Subjects: Hadith scholars; Children in the Hadith; Hadith; Hadith stories, Arabic; Hadith--Criticism, Textual; Women in the Hadith; Sunnites; History; History of doctrines--Middle Ages, 600-1500; Transmission of texts; Criticism, Textual; Islam; Islam and literature