Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
As has been said, it was a political marriage not one based on attraction, and muhammed had a precident of marrying older women: his first being 40 when he was 25, his second being 55 etc. It's reasonable to assume he wasnt attracted to the 9 year old and merely gritted his teeth, as for whether or not he should be blamed for doing so: it is hard to judge someone for doing something everyone in his time period+region had been raised to consider it ok. It's hard to blame a person for not knowing and abiding to the sexual morality of the 21st century when he was born in the 6th.
For hundreds of years before Muhammad's time most of the civilized world set the marriagable age at 12 (including Romans and the Catholic Church). The idea of not sexually abusing children isn't some 21st century innovation. Plus, if Muhammad wasn't attracted to her then why would he consummate the marriage? It may have been normal within the culture of exploitation that Muhammad lived in, but the systematic nature of the abuse in society doesn't change the fact that individual abusers are still responsible for their actions. And whatever Muhammad's culture may have taught, the fact is that to commit the act, he had to overcome all those natural human urges to protect children and to respect the principle of consent, and he also must have fostered some sort of unnatural sexual attraction to a pre-pubescent body.

Its disgusting and against nature whatever century it happened in.