Bobby. wrote on Nov 22
nd, 2014 at 10:21pm:
Quote:The list of dynastic marriages is rather long, Bobby, were they all Paedophiles as well?
Plugging a 9 year old is pedophilia.
Face facts.
Quote:I found a comment made by a historian in a documentary on the subject of young girl/old man marriages amusing. She was discussing an 18th century Russian diplomat and nobleman who met a 15 year old Spanish girl in California and he proposed marriage. They couldn't get married without a papal dispensation and he had to complete his mission first, so, if everything worked out for them, they would be married in about three years (when she would be 18 and he would be in his mid-40's). The historian made some comment about the man being a pervert who liked young girls. I found this amusing because it's such a modern notion and wasn't at all the view of the people actually involved in the transaction.
We see a female 15 years old as a girl, and so a man in his 40's must be a pedophile. But in that day and age--and in the middle ages too--15 years old was considered an adult and she was of perfectly marriageable age. It would be like someone today saying that a man who is 40 should not marry a woman who is 23 (incidentally, the ages of my husband and myself when we started dating). No one considered my husband a pedophile because of our age difference, because I was an adult, legally and socially, with a college education and a job of my own; I was not a child. People in the middle ages (and 18th century California) did not consider a woman 15 years old to still be a child either. You have to be careful, when looking at the past (including the middle ages) that you do not apply your own social conventions to the time and judge based on that; girls were considered mature at a younger age in the middle ages, and it didn't have anything to do with a bunch of old men wanting their way with them.
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9 years old was considered a child, Bobby, no doubt about it BUT marriages were conducted for many reasons in the period we're discussing.
BTW, I heartily recommend that webpage, if you really want to try and understand medieval, particularly European attitudes towards children and childhood.
The reality is we don't know that Mohammed married Aisha for reasons of Paedophilia. Such marriages were, as I've shown, quite commonplace even in Europe. Therefore, to try and claim he was a Paedophile is wrong IMO. You have no evidence as to what his motivations were or even if the story as to her age was accurate, Bobby.