Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “aisha,” refers to Muhammad’s child bride, whom (according to the hadith) he married when she was 6 or 7 years old and raped when she was around 9. The note with the author’s email said this, “This is a follow-up to last week’s comic, continuing the theme of cognitive dissonance.” But even Mo himself can’t justify the child rape:
And here’s last week’s strip to jog your memory:
Just for grins, here’s the evidence given by Wikipedia for this story, and the way that Islamic scholars, embarrassed by the Prophet’s pedophilia, have tried to revise it:
In the modern era, Aisha’s age at marriage has been a source of controversy and debate, and some Muslims have attempted to revise the previously-accepted timeline of her life. All biographical information on Muhammad and his companions was first recorded over a century after his death, but the ahadith and Islamic literature provide records of early Islam through an unbroken chain of witnesses. Various ahadith stating that Aisha was either nine or ten at the time of her consummation come from collections with sahih status, meaning they are regarded as reputable by the majority of Muslims. Some other traditional sources also mention Aisha’s age. The sira of Ibn Ishaq edited by Ibn Hisham states that she was nine or ten years old at the consummation. The historian al-Tabari also states that she was nine.
. . . Some Muslim authors have attempted to calculate Aisha’s age based on details found in some biographies, eschewing the traditionally-accepted ahadith, though Kecia Ali labels these attempts as “revisionist”. One hadith recorded in the works of some medieval scholars, including al-Dhahabi, states that Aisha’s older sister Asma was ten years older than her. This has been combined with information about Asma’s age at the time of her death and used to suggest that Aisha was over thirteen at the time of her marriage. Gibril Haddad criticizes this approach as relying on a single narrator, and notes that a hadith from the same narrator gives a broader range for the age difference between the sisters. Muhammad Niknam Arabshahi, an Iranian Islamic scholar, has considered six different approaches[clarification needed] to determining Aisha’s age and concluded that she was engaged in her late teens. Using reports on the birth year of Fatimah as a reference point, the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement scholar Muhammad Ali has estimated that Aisha was over ten years old at the time of marriage and over fifteen at the time of its consummation.
My question is this: given the above, and today’s trend to demonize and then erase historical figures who did bad stuff (Confederate generals are one example), why aren’t the same Leftists demonizing Muhammad for raping a child? Ask Linda Sarsour.
“It was a different time”..Oh wait!
It all gets convoluted when the actors are make believe. It’s hard for some to believe Jebus is coming back when he was not here in the first place. On the other hand, the confederate soldiers preceded the statues.
“My question is this: given the above, and today’s trend to demonize and then erase historical figures who did bad stuff (Confederate generals are one example), why aren’t the same Leftists demonizing Muhammad for raping a child? Ask Linda Sarsour.”
There is zero evidence that anyone wants to “erase” Confederate generals from history, whatever erase may mean. Removing Confederate statues from public spaces is an acknowledgement that society no longer considers these people worthy of being honored. If one wants to learn about these people, any good library offers the curious hundreds of volumes detailing the lives of these people. Considering that the massive outpouring of books on the Civil War continues unabated as well as the existence of several magazines devoted exclusively to the Civil War, the erasure of Confederate generals from history is absolutely the least thing anyone needs to be concerned about.
I understand that Jebus and Lincoln run pretty close in the number of books on them. By the way Cohen just arrived at the courthouse for sentencing. I am guessing 2.5 years, maybe slightly more.
Okay, pretty close – 3 years.
Okay, eliminate “erase” and just use “demonize”. My point still stands about demonizing those whose past actions don’t comport with today’s morality. I agree with some of that stuff, and especially with respect to Muhammad.
Slavery didn’t comport with the morality of 1861, or 1787 for that matter — the framers of the Constitution knew it, too, but they grabbed that wolf by the ears anyway to keep the South from bolting the Union.
Excuse the picky terminology but not bolted the Union in reference to 1787. Nothing to bolt. Preventing a Union from being created would be better. I would also have to be a bit more specific about the slavery matching up with morality. Some no, some yes.
There was a “perpetual union” created by the Articles of Confederation; the Constitution, as its preamble states, formed “a more perfect union.”
That is a nice argument but the idea or reality that the Articles made the Union more permanent than the Constitution is mostly myth. First – if it was going to accomplish this, why did we need the constitution? The truth was the Articles was such an open invitation to unite that it could do almost nothing. Often they did not get enough states to show up to even have a meeting. The need for a 13 to 0 vote made sure that nothing got done. In fact, the states were coming apart at least to many that a complete overhaul was ordered. It was originally suppose to be adjustments to the Articles but that got thrown out very quickly.
What made the Union permanent and not something you could just withdraw from was the Constitution itself. It made the states a true Union and every state that wanted in after the creation had to be admitted by the Union. Also, Nullifications of Federal law were tried and rejected. Even Jefferson tried it as I recall.
Confederate generals were white people fighting for states’ rights to enslave people who, as a rule were not white. The only people who get offended when you demonise them are other white people who probably voted for Trump so they don’t count.
Mohamed was a non white person fighting to impose his religious ideas on other non white (and white) people. When you demonise him, many Muslims (who are often perceived to be non white) get offended. They do count because they are (usually) non white.
Hopefully, the above comes through in a fairly sarcastic tone.
Why, indeed. The non-answer is always
“it’s part of the plan”. Or similar.
If god started everything that would include reason and an obligation to use it since it’s created by god. Reason does not allow for unprovable, invisible stuff. Ergo……..
Willful ignorance is so infuriating….we live in a miasma of it.
I don’t think many people are actually trying to “demonize and then erase” Confederate generals. I think they simply object to there being monuments to the Confederacy (a pro-slavery insurrection against the United States), especially those that were erected in defiance of the equal rights of black people, from the post-Reconstruction period through Jim Crow into the civil-rights era.
Yes, how can you justify heroic status to the insurrection and treason like behavior of people. And at the same time condemn Lincoln. That sounds like people who never got over it and never adjusted to reality. Lost cause my butt.
The worst part about Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha is not that it is an embarrassment for some muslim scholars, but that for others it’s actually a JUSTIFICATION for child marriage.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-children-marry-age-nine-islamic-law-diyanet-government-chp-mp-investigation-muslim-a8142131.html
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/no-minimum-age-for-marriage-of-girls-grand-mufti-576044.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bill-aiming-to-ban-child-marriages-shot-down-in-pakistan-as-anti-islamic-and-blasphemous-a6815576.html
That’s why I said one of the biggest problem with many religions is the idea that you can reason from analogy like that, too.
The age of consent being as high as 16 or 18 is quite a recent phenomenon.
Ages of consent of 10-12 years, and younger, were common everywhere a few centuries ago.
In the US state of Delaware the age of consent was as young as 7 (!) not too long ago.
(Even nowadays some countries have ages of consent that we would feel are very young, Nigeria: 11, Philippines and Angola: 12, and 13 in Japan, Niger , Comoros and Burkina Faso, several countries, such as south africa have an age of consent of 16, but 12 if the age difference is 2 years or less).
I’m not trying to defend Mr Mohammed, but consummation at age 9 must not have been very exceptional at the time. The efforts to ‘clean him up’ after 14 centuries would be hilarious if they were not so deplorable.
What I really like about Aisha, and what makes me believe there was indeed a kind of warlord Mohammed that invented a new religion, is that she observed that his revelations through the Angel Gibreel always turned out to be very convenient at the time of revelation. That he just made them up, in other words.
“So, given one or more of these exceptions, as of October 2018:
18 states have no minimum age of marriage in some cases.
2 states have a minimum age of 14.
5 states have a minimum age of 15.
19 states have a minimum age of 16.
6 states have a minimum age of 17.”
“Critics have pointed out that laws regarding child marriage in the United States compare unfavorably to laws regarding child marriage in other countries. For instance, in 2017, Human Rights Watch pointed out that Afghanistan has a tougher law on child marriage than parts of the United States: in Afghanistan the minimum marriage is 15, and that only with permission from their father or a judge; otherwise it is 16.[33] As of that date, in 25 US states there was no minimum marriage age at all if one or more of the grounds for exception existed; this number has now decreased to 18.[34]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States
” U.S.-born white children of U.S.-born parents, are more likely to marry underage than immigrants to the U.S. or the children of immigrants.
This was true even in the 1920s at the height of immigration.”
Immigrants, particularly white immigrants, can be vetted, citizens cannot.
Claims that there is an unbroken tradition is itself not documented.
I don’t demonise Mohammed. I just don’t think that he actually existed. I ascribe to the theory that Islam started off as a Christian sect. ‘Mohammed’ means ‘he who is to be praised’. ‘There is one god and Mohammed (‘he who is to be praised’ ie Jesus) is his prophet’ is to distinguish this Christian sect from other Christian sects that had 2, 3 or more gods.
And then in the 7th century, the rulers changed and they moved their centre of rule from Syria to Arabia, and as many rulers do, they founded a new religion with a new holy text, cobbling together a text from various sources.
The Qu’ran mentions very little of Mohammed. The first biography of Mohammed was only written about 150 years after his purported life.
Mohammed just didn’t exist at the time he’s supposed to have existed. He’s Jesus, who didn’t exist either.
In this day and age Muhammad would be doing time… not so fast bud, the almighty giver of bad breath would have an online pedophillia blog, where he would not be banned in Pakastain and possibly a nightclub in Saudia Arabia where nothing really happens.
There have been some other J&Ms that have dealt with the Aisha question, too:
Here and here, for example, but if you search the site for “Aisha” or “paedophilia” there are a bunch of other good ones, too.