To fully sett;le the debate on Mohamed's second wife

To fully sett;le the debate on Mohamed's second wife
by valpetridis @ 2008-12-05 - 22:23:26
I have been thinking about Mohamed and his second wife, esp. as people have strongly clung to the belief that the prophet married and slept with a nine year old. First off you must set any socially acquired normative judgments a side and look at the issue based on the circumstances of nature and the time in which Mohamed lived.First off pedophilia refers to someone attracted to children. A child is someone who has yet to go through puberty. Traditionally puberty marked the beginning of adulthood. Once a women menstruated she was considered a mature adult who was now of child rearing age. Usually facial and genital hair marked male maturity.So a woman who began menstruating is considered an adult. In many places in the world this meant the female could be married off.In the Arab nations Mohamed was born and raised in a place where sexual maturity began with menstruation.In many countries an age is legally set that is believed to be the age at which almost all women have reached sexual maturity. This age is called the age of sexual consent. In some western countries the age is set at 16, in Canada it is 14(changed to reflect court precedent and the cultural normal of the multicultural Canadian population, I was first told about this in grade 10 law class and by police in the neighborhood precinct after a friend asked if she could at 17 leave with her boyfriend to vacation in Cuba, the police said they could not stop her nor could her mom,). At this age a female can consent to have sex with anyone she desires, the same rules apply for males. Under this age its called statutory rape, or sex with a minor and it is a criminal offence and hence a no no.The reason this age is set as it is, is to avoid having to invade people privacy by having them prove they have gone through puberty, as might be done by a medical report. Thus way the law remains uniformed for everyone and is easier to enforceOne still has to wait till they are 18 to get married without parental consent. Thus in Canada a 14 year old can have sex with anyone they desire and can get married if the guardian consents to it.In Mecca at the time of Mohamed a women who had gone through puberty and was given parental consent could get married. This practice holds in many Muslim countries, where the legal age of sexual consent is 9. Both then and now women have been known to have reached puberty at the age of 9, which is the age of Mohamed’s second wife. She is said to have been fully matured as a sexual adult by the age of nine Inasmuch as we have shown Mohamed had only one wife at a time, his second wife, who he married after the death of the widow, had gone through puberty and was considered an adult in her country.Thus Mohamed married what was considered a sexually mature female adult in his time and place. The key to note for Muslims is the female had to have gone through puberty before she was eligible for marriage, setting the age at nine might not include many females as adults now made eligible for marriage as many unlike Mohamed’s second wife have not menstruated yet.There was nothing wrong with the prophets choice in his second monogamous mate.