the age consent in the US and Europe only 100 years ago for girls' marriage was as little as 10:
The following was sent to me by brother Johnny Bravo; may Allah Almighty always be pleased with him:
Assalam Alaiqum Brother Osama.
I thought you might find the following information of some use pertaining to the marriage of Hazrat Ayesha (RAA) with Prophet Muhammed (PBUH). I took this info from the soc.religion.islam newsgroup and it is written by various knowledgeable Muslims informing that the age of consent in the USA was 10 hardly 100 years ago and 11 in the UK, Talmud allowing 3 year olds to get married! etc. :-
"(And there is evidence that Ayesha was substantially older. That some of our ancient scholars preferred the younger age shows, in fact, that they did not consider marriage at that age to be reprehensible, otherwise they would have preferred the evidence for a later marriage and consummation.)
At the time the marriage was arranged, Muhammad had not left Makka; he was not the leader of a powerful community; indeed, his life was in danger. I raise this point because it is asserted, sometimes, that, essentially, he could have whatever he wanted. Rather, if this marriage had been an outrage to the community, it would have been *very* harmful to his cause."
Above comments by Abdulrahman Lomax.
The age of sexual consent is still quite low in many places. In Japan, people can legally have sex at age 13, and in Spain they can legally have sex at age 12. (This data comes from the Age of Consent chart, which you can see at:
http://www.ageofconsent.com/ageofconsent.htm)
The Prophet's contemporaries (both enemies and friends) clearly accepted the Prophet's marriage to `Aisha without any problem. We see the evidence for this by the lack of criticism against the marriage until modern times. However, a change in culture caused the change in our times today.
A 40-year-old man having sex with a 14-year-old woman may be a "pedophile" in the USA today, but not in China today (where the age of consent is 14), nor in the USA last century. Biology is a much better standard by which to determine these things in my view, not the arbitrariness of human culture.
***** In the USA last century, the age of consent was 10 years old. California was the first state to change the age of consent to 14, which it did in 1889. After California, other US states joined in and raised the age of consent too. (Source:
http://www.ageofconsent.com/comments/numberone.htm)
As for the reasons why we age of consent just seems to get higher and higher, Essentially, we need more education just to survive in today's society, and this takes much more time. This additional education we need to function in today's society seems to me to be the main cause of the increase in the age of consent in many 20th century societies. The Common Law age of consent was 10. The French penal code raised the age from 11 to 13 only a century ago. In England, it was only in 1929 (70 years ago) that the ancient Christian minimum age for the marriage of females, which was 12, was abandoned. The early rock and roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis was considerably older than his 13 cousin whom he married in all legality in Arkansas. Since then, the age there has been raised to 16. That marriage lasted for about 15 years and there was never any other "scandal" associated with Jerry Lee Lewis. The story is quite different, however, for his cousin Jimmy Swaggart (the well-known and disgraced tele-evangelist) who married a woman his own age but later publicly confessed that he was an adulterer and a whoremonger.
In the seventh century, 3 year old girls were burned to death or tortured in Europe for copulating with demons, witches and sorcerers. Strong sexual passions were attributed to the youngest children. Even Jean Bodin, one of the greatest legal authorities of his time, said that the appropriate age of consent for a female was 6. (I do not mean to suggest that 3 year olds did in fact have sexual relations with demons. It is however interesting to see that at that time it was publicly believed that child-adult relations were the fault of seductive children who sought out mature men rather than today's popular belief that it is instead pedophiliac adults who prey on innocent, unsuspecting children.)
In the US (an example of a prominent western country, since the west had the greatest effect on the world in the last couple of centuries.) They considered a seven year old female competent on making decisions regarding sex, though it was raised later on (in 1886, after attempts to raise the age of consent, Delaware was the only state to retain the common law age of seven, while twenty five states set the minimum age at a mere ten.) In older times, children were not perceived in the same sense that we perceive them, but the perception was changed gradually, which is due to a great extent to industrialization, and of course sigmund freud and others came along with their theories and supported these changes in social thinking (the word adolescent itself was introduced as recently as 1904.)
