ِAn interesting discussion.
It might be of help to know that all traditional Islamic history books are biased and that till today there're no historical rigorous disciplines which incorporate and apply archealogical and other modern techniques used in historical investivations today. Islamic historical writing has never matured in its academic sense understood today (or in the sense of tafseer methologies) nor there were ever set and known criteria to accounting for events. Many of so called Islamic history books therefore cannot be indepedently verified nor did they even follow the islamically accepted way of narration of hadith or the Koran.
It is the varying different readings of what had happend in the past, for instance, at the end of the reign of the 3rd calliph, Uthman Ibn Afan whom was killed, that schism started in Islam. As a an ex-sunni Muslim, I was taught by those I studied upon for 10 years to distrust the shia interpretations of historical events thenceforth. This distrust is mutual between the two parties and it reaches to the authenticity of the Uthmanic Koran in the eyes of the shia, who claim they have another version of it, Fatima Koran, and that the Uthmanic Koranic text has been tampered with. It is worth mentioning that ibn khallikan has written a historical book to which my teachers were opposed, simply because he was a shia - they didn't have a meaningful way of separating the wheat from the chaff in the book and little is done in the field of history. Imam al-nawawi's accounts for certain aspects of sharia were rejected because he was suspected of being a sufi in methodology.
In the sunni camp, Ibn Katheer in his famus book, The Begining and The End, didn't follow the same method of compilling hadith with utmost care, even though the book includes the sirah/seerat which certain Koranic verses cannot be understood without. However, when it comes to his famus tafseer, he was more strict because a) verses and sorats require the reason or the event leading to any revelation in order to be contextualised and properly understood and b) unlike history, there were many companions, namely Ibn Abas and Ibn Umar, who have had commented on the Koranic literature and the way was trodden upon long before him.
His contemporary, Ibn al-qayyim ( both were students of Ibn Taymiyyah, died in 726 H) wrote his book, Zad al-maad; a book in five volumes each about 400 -500 pages, while travelling on a camel to Mecca with no references available to him but his flawless memory according to his introduction, focused only on seerat and, as any Fageeh who has little knowledge in the field of hadith, relied upon Muhaditheens when it came to backing up his histroical account Mo's actual life - the work's to some extent repetitive and reading it is but going into a revolving door.
It is not only the so called Islamic history that suffered from biasness and tentativeness; the Arabic poetry too because any peotic literature, which was and still is regarded highly in accounting for battles in Islam, that disagreed with Islam was put out of circulation and forbidden from narration. For example, the killing of Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf and other poets who used their language to discredit Muhammed and his ideology. Read if you wish the famous verse in sorat Ash-shuar'a (Poets) No 26 which discourages dealing in poetry against Mohammed as well as the famous hatith in Bukhari and Muslim narrated by Abu-whoriah re the issue at hand. It's an Orwellian scale of controling human culture and history which didn't agree with the official mainstream narration, and for centuries.
unfortunately, for those of you who are unaware of these issues and many others, for different reasons including the language barrier, the debate of whether Aiysha was 9 or 10 has not really started. You simply lack the basic ability to ascertain which historical book(s), of the translated ones, you should follow and since no one person in Islam has all the answers or that doesn't depend on other sources, how could it be possible for you even to begin to investigate a thing? It is mission impossible without Tom Cruise.
Until 5 years ago, the age of marriage for girls in Saudi Arabia was unspecified and unstated in any of the royal proclamations - it is 18 now which begs the question; how could anyone say it is Islamically unlawful for me to marry a girl of 16 years in KSA whilst the prophet did it? It is the moral embarrassment caused by Western media such as the story in the link below that made them raise the age of marriage in Saudi, to which the clergymen have nothing to say but quoting (O believers obey your rulers).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7579616.stmAlso read this related news :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7711554.stm
Topic: Pedophilia and current rationalizations