Devout muslim mother 'jailed' for forcing young children to marry

I find it so amusing how you think every proclaimed Muslim is a practising one. And while all Muslims are supposed to live by Muhammed's example, not many do. Futhermore, times have moved on since then (when as a previous poster was saying the culture of marrying women off younger was prevalent not only among the Arabs, but among many other peoples as the average life expectancy was low).

While I cannot speak with great authority on the matter, I do know consent from the person is required in order for them to marry. So I doubt any practising Muslim would 'marry children off young' forcibly, as that wouldn't correlate with the Islamic theology. And Muhammed was not in direct contact with God as he was receiving his instructions through the angel Jibril.

As for Muhammed being a fraud, I fail to see what that has to do with this thread. Or in fact any of the above I had to address

Surely Jibril should have whispered in his ear when he was nodding off to sleep 'there really shouldn't be a child in your bed'. The consent of a child is worthless anyway, because by definition they are a child and cannot consent. I do not buy the different times argument, you are defending a prophet here not a normal citizen who couldn't have known better.

What angels 'should' do is of little concern to me -_-

Following your logic, perhaps he should have gone to every single bedside then and whispered the same thing? o_O The practice of taking younger wives was more commonplace then because it was a different time, whether you buy it or not. That is a fact. You only have to read the literature across the many cultures that existed then to know that.

In regards to consent, I was speaking about marriage generally. Meh, the whole consent of a child being worthless leads to many questions, the most important being, would your definition of a child and the definition at the time be the same?

As others has been said before, the issue of whether Muhammed actually consummated the marriage with Aisha when she was 9 is strongly contested. So yes, he was a prophet, but does that mean he was the epitome of perfection?

I am not defending anyone, merely putting across a differing viewpoint. I couldn't care less whether you choose to consider or not.

We have gone considerably off-topic now -__-

I do not feel that we have gone off topic; the reason I brought it up was that this woman feels she is supposed to or can marry off her daughters at 15 because Mohammed did it. Seeing as Mohammed was going to be the blueprint for everyone elses lives for thousands of years to come it might have been worthwhile for the angel telling him it was wrong, afterall it would have stopped the abuse of hundreds of thousands of girls.

Either he was actually in communication with God and he did wrong, or he was a normal human being, in both cases he quite clearly isn't the person to be following. What we now know is that girls have undeveloped minds, and more importantly undeveloped bodies incapable of pregnancy. How can any good Muslim ignore the fact Mohammed was wrong about something? Surely that's where you begin picking and choosing what's right for yourself and your own principles, and that is definately not what Islam is all about.