In part your question feeds off of gullibility. When it comes to that, I am just as gullible as you are.

I am quite concerned over the continued vilification of all Muslims - throughout the western world, but especially the US. I believe that this may be a precursor of worse things to come.

We are for Justice and Mercy, and Truth and Peace, and true Freedom. Edward Burroughs 1659

first off, urban legends are carefully crafted brainworms -- ideas so irritating or intriguing or salacious that they tend to fascinate us, juicy gossip tidbits that cry out for repetition, that make a good shock-value anecdote.

second, human behaviour over the millennia is in many instances so bizarre,  often so outrageously abusive, so absurd, so unfair, often grotesquely sadistic and violent, that it's hard at first glance to dismiss any nasty allegation about cultural vagaries or religious dogma as prima facie ridiculous.  who would give credence to the nastiness of (to pick just one ghastly example) FGM if it were not well-attested and documented?  or (historical) footbinding?  or the trade in prostituted children, including the "Asian sex tourism" so popular among highly respectable affluent Amero/Euro corporate drones?

so it's not prima facie absurd that some patriarchal religion or other could have a fine-print commandment that certain kinds of sex with children are OK for adult males, but others are not.   in fact it's pretty believable in the long historical context of male sexual entitlement and the lowly status of women and children.

but right now, in the islamophobic atmosphere of US propaganda, it's a bit of meme-warfare masquerading as "human wickedness as usual".

antisemites used to accuse European Jewry of killing and eating Christian babies...  the Blood Libel as a concept never dies, the ascription to the loathed Other of the full depth of human nastiness that each society wants to pretend could never occur w/in its own ranks...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

I am not sure how people manage to justify ignoring the present and long for the "good old days".

Many fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, and Jews are heavily into it - each seeking to create a past that never existed.

The US is into it. I wonder if Regan was the desire to re-live the 1950's? The current doctrine "Century for a New America" seems to me to recycle "Manifest Destiny" - even as the US undergoes economic decline. (Are those some violins I hear?)

Whether it be nationalism or religion, this desire to re-live the imaginary past seems to be a very bloody fantasy.

yet it serves as an talking point (Muhammad the paedophile) for Islam-bashers

And the racists feed off of those who seek to relive the past, if they are not actually the same people.

We are for Justice and Mercy, and Truth and Peace, and true Freedom. Edward Burroughs 1659

Islam does deal very frankly with issues of (intramarital, heterosexual) sexuality, and so it is not at all unusual for people to seek and receive fatawa regarding specific sex acts.  But this one is clearly an Islamophobic invention.

Regarding Aisha, she's actually a fascinating character, and my anecdotal impression from conversations with (Sunni) friends about her is that there is considerable modern discomfort about the age issue.  Some would just rather not think about it, but other responses range from "STFU you Eurocentric bastards, it was normal behavior at the time" to "actually she was probably older than 9, no matter what the Qur'an says."

I will note that early marriage is not unusual in tribal and pre-industrial societies (including historically in Europe), and we can see artifacts of that even in modern laws in some places.  This indicates that girls as young as 13 can get married in New Hampshire with parental consent; it's 12 for girls in "traditional" marriages in South Africa; it's 14 in Paraguay and Venezuela, 15 in Thailand.... and 9 in Yemen.  Actually, there is a fair amount of inconsistency in the Islamic countries -- in Morroco it's 18, Algeria it's 21 for men and 18 for women, in Egypt (as in much of the so-called "West") it's 18 for men and 16 for women, while in other places the ages go down to 9 or 13.  In Jordan, a court must consent to any marriage of a girl under 18 to a man more than 20 years older than she is. (!!)  In Iran, a girl of 13 doesn't need her parents' consent, nor does a girl of 14 in Madagascar.  Apparently in Spain, you can marry at 16 with parental consent, but (this surprised me) the "age of consent" for sexual activity is 13.

But I digress.  There is some very interesting context regarding Aisha and Muhammad's other wives in Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks.  I was surprised to find the chapter reproduced in full online, although that version oddly renders Abu Bakr's name as "Abu Bake."  (Spellcheckers gone wild?)  Interesting reading.

Note that the Shia are not particular fans of Aisha; the tension between her and Muhammad's daughter Fatima (who married his cousin Ali) are related to the roots of the Sunni-Shia schism.

There are several clear signs that the term is a fraud -- the letter ذ or dh is often rendered into a z sound in various colloquial dialects of Arabic, or sometimes into a th, and is difficult to pronounce for English speakers anyway.  The proper transliteration should be "mufakhadha," (no t at the end, that's another giveaway that this is being written about by people who don't really speak or read Arabic) but a Google search for that spelling yields zero results.  There are several other possible (colloquial) transliterations, but those are even less common in Google than the given one, with most yielding zero results and only one returning less than 300 hits, most of which are the same.

The use of an apostrophe is just bizarre and is an even clearer sign that this is BS.  An apostrophe is used in some methods of transliterating Arabic to substitute for specific letters, but none of them are in this word.  It just doesn't belong there.  Full stop.

Finally, as I mentioned, the "t" at the end of the word is another sign.  It's a little too complicated to explain here, but there's a letter ة called ta marbouta that often ends nouns of feminine gender.  Its pronunciation changes from a soft a to at depending on context.  On its own, normally it would be transliterated as an a, not at.

So the transliteration "mufa'khathat" is just plain illiterate and incoherent.  Clearly the term is being used almost entirely by people who don't know Arabic at all, because even a rank beginner wouldn't have transliterated it that way.

I did Google the term in Arabic, though, and got a whopping 497 results, most of them repetitive and similar to this one, a fatwa calling the practice "illegal" and imported from "pornographic films sent by the infidels and the enemies of Islam."  FWIW.

So it seems that Muhammad was indeed a pedophile

Sigh... Is that what you understood from what you read there?

You should have seen enough from the exchange of hostilities in your quoted passage to understand that the issue will not be easy to "settle". Since Islam-bashers use it as an inflammatory meme, there are inflammatory replies from the other side.

And what makes you refer to the Qur'an? As I noted above, the oral tradition legends about Aisha and her marriage are set down in the hadith.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

but it didn't cross my mind that it could be so false in Wikipedia.

......

Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.