MEANWHILE, NO ONE EVEN DISPUTES THAT MARY WAS A MODERN "MINOR":

Working under the supervision of Oxford's Professor Christopher Melchert -- a world-renowned expert in Islamic studies -- Little subjects the traditional Islamic sources in general (and the Aisha hadith in particular) to the historical-critical method.

In contrast to traditional religious methods, the historical-critical approach involves using the latest techniques from the modern historian's toolkit to ascertain historical plausibility or lack thereof. For example, scholars scour the text for historical anachronisms, which would alert them to a fabrication. Readers may be familiar with a similar historical-critical approach applied to biblical materials, popularized among the general public by such scholars as Bart Ehrman, who differentiate between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, which are not necessarily the same thing.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, some Muslim apologists avidly consume such historical-critical scholarship as it pertains to the Bible and Jesus. Most serious historians, for example, consider the idea of Christ's divinity and the doctrine of the Trinity as later developments of the Christian tradition. It is not difficult to see why Muslims would be sympathetic to such conclusions. On the other hand, some of these same Muslims may feel uneasy when a similar critical approach is applied to traditional Islamic sources. (Of course, this double-mindedness exists also among some conservative Christian apologists who, for instance, are all too happy to exploit the latest historical-critical findings in regard to the Quran's transmission history, while at the same time dismissing Ehrman and others.)

Little's conclusions are far-reaching and will come as welcome news to many Muslims. After analyzing all the various versions of the Aisha marital report, Little concludes the hadith was fabricated "whole cloth" by a narrator named Hisham ibn Urwa, after he relocated to Iraq between the years 754 and 765 CE. Not only would this put the circulation of this report almost a century and a half after the events it purports to describe, but it would also mean it was fabricated in the altogether different environment of Iraq, almost 1,000 miles away from the Arabian city of Medina (where the marriage would have taken place). As it turns out, the fabrication served distinct sectarian and political ends.

Little includes other reports -- such as Aisha purportedly playing with dolls in Muhammad's household -- in his overall critical assessment, deeming them to be partisan sectarian and political stories that are historically untrue. In other words, critical historians have little reason to believe Aisha was in fact married as a child.

The findings of Little's research line up with the work of several modern Muslim scholars and authors who have tackled the same topic before. However, many of these works -- though certainly not all of them -- have been apologetic in nature, poorly-argued, falling short of serious scholarship. What makes Little's contribution especially noteworthy is that he argues the case from a rigorous academic perspective, even refining a scholarly methodology known as the "isnad-cum-matn analysis." This method involves looking for correlations and patterns between the text of a hadith and its chain of transmitters to reconstruct the original from which the other texts disseminate. The process can help identify when a particular report originated (and from whom). Using this Western historical technique, Little's conclusions vindicate the reformist Muslim position.

It should, of course, be noted that even within the classical Islamic tradition there has always been reason to doubt the Aisha marital hadith. As Little writes in his dissertation, Ibn Urwa -- the originator of the report -- was considered unreliable even according to traditional criteria, at least after he relocated to Iraq. He was accused of "senility" (a charitable way of explaining a narrator's unreliable reports) and even of a form of academic deception called "tadlis" in hadith terminology. Tadlis in a hadith does not necessarily mean outright lying or fabrication but typically involves the omission of a flaw in the sourcing, such as by not mentioning a weak link in the chain of transmission so as to imply the hadith's reliability. At minimum, tadlis is a form of sloppiness in transmission.

Little notes the absence of the marital age reports in the earliest sources, including in certain key biographical and legal works. Ibn Ishaq -- Muhammad's best-known biographer -- mentioned nothing about Aisha's age at marriage; the detail was, however, added later by the historian Ibn Hisham (d. 833 CE). Perhaps more damning is the fact the marital age hadith is absent from the earliest Medinan legal collections, including Imam Malik's al-Muwatta, even though the latter cites Ibn Urwa dozens of times. As Little writes, "the failure of Malik to cite this hadith suggests not merely that Malik rejected it, but that it was not circulating in Medina at that time. This is especially given that the marital-age hadith has important legal ramifications, and thus would surely have demanded inclusion into a dedicated Madinan collection of Madinan legal Hadith."

The hadith is also absent from al-Mudawwana, a proto-Maliki collection of Medinan legal transmissions. Indeed, Little writes that, to the best of his knowledge, the earliest Maliki work to cite any version of the marital age hadith appeared "nearly three centuries after the hadith's initial mass-dissemination in Iraq." In sum, the early marriage of Aisha is absent from key early sources in the very city where the event would have taken place. Using this argument from silence (i.e., the absence of this report in the early sources), Little concludes this was a story invented in eighth-century Iraq and only later back-projected onto the life story of Muhammad.

This, of course, begs the question: why? According to Little, the claim about Aisha's age was part of medieval sectarian propaganda, concocted by a Sunni figure to bolster the image of Aisha against Shiite detractors. (Strictly speaking, the terms "Sunni" and "Shiite" only became current later; scholars of this period tend to refer instead to "proto-Sunni" and "proto-Shiite" movements and figures.) This explains why the hadith was fabricated in the Shiite hotbed of Iraq. Aisha, Muhammad's wife and the daughter of the first "Rightly Guided" Caliph of Sunni Islam, Abu Bakr, had a famous rivalry with the prophet's cousin and son-in-law Ali, the first imam for Shiites and the fourth caliph for Sunnis. Not only did Aisha's father compete with Ali for the caliphate, but Aisha herself would also later lead an insurrection against Ali.

In subsequent generations, Sunnis and Shiites used rival lineages to claim religious and political authority. In order to elevate Aisha's status (and their own lineage through her), some Sunnis asserted that she was Muhammad's favorite and his only virgin wife. As a religious and tribal leader, Muhammad had several wives, most of them divorced or widows from his community; collectively, they were revered as "the Mothers of the Believers." Aisha's alleged youth was used to stress her virginal purity -- or, rather, her virginal purity was implied by the extremely young age at which she was said to have been married.

Ancient Near Eastern cultures (like many others throughout history and into modernity) prized virginal purity due to the connotation of being free of carnal sin. For instance, both Christians and Muslims have stressed that Jesus' mother, Mary, was a virgin.

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