By "critic" are you referring to religious or historical scholars, or some subset thereof? Surely there must be people who find the idea of a man taking a child as a wife, and a prepubescent girl as a sexual partner worthy of criticism.
And you are saying that in ancient times, boys and girls matured sexually and emotionally at such young ages? Six? Nine? I understand that in a world with short lifespans, people were less concerned with the morals of future societies and more concerned with avoiding extinction, as it were. And that this attitude, along with other attitudes about the value of women, motivated them to promote ideas that later societies would find repulsive. I know that Christians also use a form of "it was different back then" to justify attitudes and ideas that we find repulsive today. How does a modern-day Muslim view the issue of taking child brides?
And you are saying that in ancient times, boys and girls matured sexually and emotionally at such young ages? Six? Nine? I understand that in a world with short lifespans, people were less concerned with the morals of future societies and more concerned with avoiding extinction, as it were. And that this attitude, along with other attitudes about the value of women, motivated them to promote ideas that later societies would find repulsive. I know that Christians also use a form of "it was different back then" to justify attitudes and ideas that we find repulsive today. How does a modern-day Muslim view the issue of taking child brides?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
