fight].”[27]

Ibn ʿUmar did not receive permission to participate in the Battle of Uḥud because he was fourteen years old. When the Battle of the Trench occurred, the Prophet ﷺ reevaluated him and permitted him to fight because he had reached the minimum age of fifteen. The claim is that if Ibn ʿUmar was not allowed to participate in the Battle of Uḥud at the age of fourteen andʿĀʾisha was seen participating in the battle, that must mean she was at least fifteen years old at the Battle of Uḥud. Since the Battle of Uḥud occurred one to two years after consummation, she must have consummated the marriage at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

This type of analogy (qiyās) is a deficient one (qiyās maʿa al-fāriq). The purpose ofthe age of ten. The daughter of that girl also reached puberty at the age of nine and gave birth at the age of ten.” [41] Al-Ḥasan ibn Ṣaliḥ said: “I met with a slave girl that belonged to us who became a grandmother at the age of twenty-one.” [42] It becomes clear that there are many instances of girls reaching puberty at the age of nine, with some even giving birth at the age of ten in the Arabian Peninsula.

The second question is, how do we define what a child is? Neil Postman, a former professor at New York University, wrote the book The Disappearance of Childhood. In it, he argues that childhood was one of the great inventions of the Renaissance, just like any other social