Religion of Peace

Islam Files, No. 2 — Sahih al-Bukhari Says the Marriage Was Contracted at Six and Consummated at Nine. The Same Canon Says a Rape Did Not Occur Unless Four Male Muslim Witnesses Saw It.

Sahih al-Bukhari 5134, on the authority of Aisha: he married her when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine. Bukhari 3894 puts the same ages in her own voice, including the scene: women washed her, the Prophet arrived mid-morning, she was nine. Bukhari 3896 and 5158, and Muslim 1422c, repeat the numbers. The chain runs through Hisham ibn Urwa from his father Urwa, Aisha’s nephew. Classical commentators did not treat nine as a copyist’s error. They treated it as the relevant age of consummation. The same volumes fix the prayer times.

The legal sequel sits in the same library. Qur’an 24:4 and 24:13 require four witnesses for the accusation of zina. Fail to produce them and the accuser receives eighty lashes for slander. The witnesses, in the classical schools, are adult Muslim men. A non-Muslim’s testimony does not bind a Muslim defendant. Qur’an 2:282, the longest verse in the book, sets the ratio for financial contracts at two women for one man, “so that if one of the two errs, the other can remind her.” Sahih al-Bukhari 304 and 2658 preserve the gloss attributed to the Prophet: women are “deficient in intelligence and religion,” and the proof offered for the first deficiency is that a woman’s testimony is half a man’s.

The practical arithmetic is not subtle. Four male Muslim eyewitnesses to the act. If the only people in the room were the woman and the accused, the act is legally unproven. If the woman cannot prove it, the unproven accusation can become her problem. Classical manuals then locate the remedy upstream: dress the woman so she does not “tempt.” The burka is not a fashion footnote. It is the downstream product of a courtroom that was built to disbelieve her.

Modern pamphlets split the canon in two. Ritual chapters remain “sahih.” The marriage ages become “historical context.” The witness rules become “misunderstood.” The text on the page did not change. The press release did.

Filed from the primary texts and the public record:

A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

At around 10 p.m. on July 6, 1988, a pressure safety valve that had been pulled for maintenance that morning let gas condensate leak past a blind flange that had only been hand-tightened. Within 22 minutes, the Piper Alpha platform, 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen in the North

Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

On March 10, 2017, Netflix's official Twitter account posted four words that would follow the company around for the next six years: "Love is sharing a password." It was a promo tweet for a show called Love, but it was also, unmistakably, a policy statement — an

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

On June 5, 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul stood before reporters and "indefinitely paused" New York's Central Business District Tolling Program, the long-planned congestion charge for driving into Manhattan below 60th Street. The launch was three weeks away. Hochul cited affordability concerns for working- and middle-

Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.

On January 13, 2023, Twitter's API went dark for third-party client apps with no announcement and no explanation. Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix, and others simply stopped working, all at once, for everyone. Developers spent days guessing whether it was a bug, an outage, or deliberate. Four days later,

Read more

A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.