Sectarian tensions, islamophobia, and decolonization: comparing Jasser Auda’s and Jonathan Brown’s analysis of the hadiths concerning Aisha’s marital age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ongoing debate surrounding the hadiths on Aisha’s age of marriage has givenrise to two main positions among Muslim scholars, namely: the rejectors, thosewho reject the hadiths’ validity and propose the view that Aisha got married atan older age, and the defenders, those who defend them as valid hadiths andaccept that Aisha consummated her marriage at the early age of nine years old. Inthis study, we examine this issue through the opposing arguments offered by twocontemporary Muslim scholars: Jasser Auda, who represents the view of hadithrejectors, and Jonathan Brown, who represents those who accept the validity of thehadiths. These two scholars have been chosen to represent these two standpointsmainly because of their novel and distinctive theoretical contributions to theongoing debate. Entangled in this debate is the issue of whether pre-modernreality can be assessed by using modern norms. We employ critical analysis onthe epistemological and methodological aspects surrounding the two scholars’interpretations of the hadiths of Aisha’s age of marriage. We argue that threesignificant features distinguish Auda and Brown’s dispositions. These are: first,their different conceptions of the interplay between politics, knowledge, andmemory; second, their differing epistemological approaches to hadith science;and third, their opposing assumptions about the universality of modern norms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".