Listen here: https://open.substack.com/pub/virginmonkboy/p/what-they-did-to-mary-magdalene-theyre?r=1jdp1w&utm_medium=ios
For centuries, Christianity did something remarkable to Mary Magdalene.
It took the woman who remained near Jesus through the crucifixion, went to the tomb, encountered the risen Christ, and carried the news of the resurrection back to the disciples, and turned her into a prostitute.
The Gospels never call Mary Magdalene a prostitute.
That image came later, particularly in Western Christianity, where Mary Magdalene became conflated with other women in the Gospel stories, including the unnamed “sinful woman” who anoints Jesus’ feet.
Eventually, “Mary Magdalene” became almost synonymous with “repentant prostitute.”
And look at what disappeared.
The disciple.
The witness.
The woman who stayed when others fled.
The woman entrusted with the message at the very center of Christianity.
Instead of remembering one of the strongest women in the Gospel story, generations remembered her primarily through sex.
I keep thinking about that when I see what has happened to Aisha.
Because today one of the strongest women in Islamic history has been reduced to two numbers:
6 and 9.
Sayyida Aisha was not merely an important Muslim woman. She was Aisha, Mother of the Believers, one of the most powerful intellectual voices Islam has ever produced and one of the strongest women in religious history.
She is also one of the most thoroughly documented people of Islam’s entire first century.
After Muhammad died, Aisha became one of the foremost authorities on his life. Thousands of reports come through her. When it came to Muhammad’s private life, his prayers, his habits, his moods, his marriage, his final illness, and the things no public companion could have witnessed, very often Aisha is the reason Muslims know them at all.
Jurists came to her with questions. Companions who had walked beside Muhammad for years deferred to her memory. When men got something wrong, Aisha corrected them, and those corrections were preserved because her authority mattered.
She did not simply repeat what other people had taught her. She interpreted, argued, remembered, challenged, and taught an entire generation that came after Muhammad.
And she was hardly some timid figure confined to the margins of history.
Twenty-four years after Muhammad died, Aisha rode at the head of an army and gave battle in the field.
Whatever judgment anyone makes about the politics of that moment, think about the woman standing there.
This is the woman modern polemic asks us to imagine primarily as frightened, passive and voiceless.
But Aisha was anything but voiceless.
She spoke about Muhammad with an intimacy almost nobody else could. She told people about his kindness and his habits, their disagreements and her jealousy, the times she became angry with him, his prayers, his illness, and finally his death with his head resting against her.
The tradition did not flatten her into a sanitized saint. It preserved a woman with a sharp mind, a strong personality, disagreements, complaints, affection, jealousy, judgment, and conviction. In other words, it preserved Aisha as a real human being, not as the passive figure modern polemic needs her to be.
She had the standing, the intelligence and the voice to tell people what she thought, and the historical record shows again and again that she was perfectly willing to do exactly that.
Yet increasingly, none of this is the Aisha many Westerners ever meet. They meet “six,” “nine,” “child bride,” “victim,” and then, just like Mary Magdalene, the woman disappears behind the sexual story told about her.
There is an important difference between the two cases.
The Gospels simply do not identify Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.
Reports saying Aisha was six at betrothal and nine when her marriage began do exist in later hadith collections. The historical problem is that those reports are routinely presented as though they settle the question while the rest of the evidence is never mentioned.
It does not.
The broader record includes Aisha’s family chronology, her previous betrothal, her memories of the early Meccan period, early biographical traditions, and serious questions about the transmission of the age reports themselves. Taken together, that evidence points away from childhood, with much of the historical weight placing her in her teens.
James S. Coates lays that case out source by source in his Fireline Press article, Aisha: The Charge Nobody Made for Thirteen Centuries. I’m not going to reproduce his entire argument here. If you want the evidence behind the age question, read it.
What interests me here is something else: why are we so willing to let a sexual claim become the entire identity of a powerful woman?
Mary Magdalene becomes the prostitute. Aisha becomes the child bride.
In both cases, everything that made these women difficult to reduce to simple narratives gets pushed aside: their intelligence, authority, courage, voices, and influence over the generations that followed them.
Mary becomes useful as a story about sexual sin. Aisha becomes useful as a weapon against Muhammad. And suddenly everyone is speaking about these women while remarkably few are listening to them.
Maybe Christians in particular should recognize what is happening.
We spent centuries allowing one of Christianity’s greatest women to be remembered for something the Gospel never actually says about her. We should be very careful before doing something similar to another woman.
Aisha deserves to be encountered as Aisha, not as two numbers and not as somebody else’s argument.
She was Aisha, Mother of the Believers: scholar, teacher, jurist, historian, political force, guardian of the intimate memory of Muhammad, and one of the strongest women the religious world has ever produced.
Mary Magdalene deserved the same courtesy.
It took us a very long time to give it back to her.
https://www.virginmonkboy.com/p/what-they-did-to-mary-magdalene-theyre
See also:
Aisha: The Charge Nobody Made for Thirteen Centuries
https://www.fireline.press/p/aisha-the-charge-nobody-made-for
