@AspiringSoul
"Most educated and informed muslims who are free from historically politically charged sectarian views, don't believe Aisha was 9 years old when her marraige was consumated and have a better idea of the background sectarian/political contexts that led to those 'hadiths'."
I must confess to not being a Muslim scholar here - with that in mind, what verses do the age of Aisha (and Muhammad's age when he married her) appear? Are those verses outside the accepted canon of the Qur'an and agreed upon Hadith?
For the record, I don't believe in methods that try to locate a weakness in a religion and kick it, and I don't see Muslims as enemies either. I don't think Islam is the truth, but I do believe there are people who care greatly about truth who are Muslims.
They are in the Sahih Bukhari collection, the most famous collection of hadith.
Hadith are a lot different to the Quran ie they are stories/narrations passed on for a few generations orally until certain Imams (who happened to be persian and living under strict Abbasid rule) decided to collect as many of these narrations they could and then go through the task of verifying every chain in the narration and deciding what to accept and what to reject. This work was done around 2 centuries after the prophet SAW. Yet from the get go, there was prejudice in this since the actual decendants of the prophet (the shia imams) were usually under imprisonment/house arrest and their opinions/narrations didn't matter, which is why shia have their own hadith.
The vast majority of the narrations that they did receive though, were rejected, that doesnt mean they were false, just that the chain of narration may have 1 individual in it who was questionable. Obviously this process is subjective, but i'm led to believe men like Imam Bukhari were far far more learned than us commonfolk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith_studies#Importance_of_the_sanad
What made it through was classified as 'saheeh'.
Yet even till this day there are imams who scrutinise hadith and classify them differently. Everyone has an opinion.
When you say 'agreed upon hadith' this is wrong, they are not necessarily 'agreed' upon, they are verified as 'saheeh' (that the source is trustworthy) rather than the content itself being questioned. Just the same there are hadiths within the Saheeh bukhari collection that contradict each other. So it's important for people not to get swept away by emotion and just judge what they clearly have never spent the time to learn. One book out of the Sahih bukhari book is as lengthy as the entire old and new testaments together just in content, imagine having the task of verifiyng each hadith? then imagine that being one book out of 9 volumes and that was only a tiny percentage of what was accepted by Imam Bukhari.
So imagine how much information he had to process. Insane.
Then extend that to other hadith collections too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutub_al-Sittah
6 hadith collections all from the 9th century, all persian meaning all were under the yoke of an oppressive abbasid regime, you would be mad to accept them all at face value without knowing how some could be used as a political pretext.
It's actually also true, much like the jewish religion, that the hadith/oral traditions are not meant to be shared by common people but by qualified scholars because the common man is not trained to understand them ie background contexts like i mentioned. It takes wisdom to know what is relevant according to the time/place, that's the mythos in religion. that's something many do not understand about the actual quotes/stories in the hadith attributed to the prophet SAW ie so we see he said something to someone....does that mean that applies to all of us? ie the medicine given to one person may not be ideal for another person. So even beyond common hadith scholarship, it requites a special person who possesses God given wisdom/hikmah to make sense of them.
i have even openly talked about how muslim translators have lied by inserting their own words/opinions into translations of the Quran which in turn retards a lot of common muslims who do not know the difference
Mohsin khan was notorious for this (see his opinions in brackets)
example
(3) Similarly (to complete My Blessings on you), We have sent among you a Messenger (Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم) of your own, reciting to you Our Verses (the Qur'an) and purifying you, and teaching you the Book (the Qur'an) and the Hikmah (i.e. sunnah, Islamic laws and Fiqh - jurisprudence), and teaching you that which you used not to know.
(سورة البقرة, Al-Baqara, Chapter #2, Verse #151)
So the Quran always says 'Scripture and wisdom' whereas the common muslim now literally thinks 'Quran and hadith'
they are not the same.
how would a person without wisdom spot the mythos in a hadith? ie they would take it at face value.
So a lot of the fanatical types who use hadith think they are doing so on the basis of what they think is in the Quran, when it isn't...and the one thing they lack is wisdom, ironic isn't it?
it is better to treat the hadith as historical sources of information that 'may' contain the actual wisdom of the prophet SAW, so the primary aim should be to study them in order to try to find this hikmah.
I can't do this topic enough justice in a post. It is something i strongly feel. For example many of the prophecies in the hadith, i could only really make sense of them after i read bible prophecy..and vice versa. I feel it is a privilege to have that, but by no means does it mean the hadith collections are perfect.