years old. Thus, even if the one being nursed were older than the woman nursing him—such as a sixty-year-old elderly man nursing once from a young woman of twenty—he would become her son. This is the view of the literalist school, because they stipulate neither an age limit nor a specified number of nursings: whenever nursing takes place, it has legal effect. Their evidence is the general wording of His saying: “Your mothers who nursed you,” and the case of Salim, the freed slave of Abu Hudhayfah.
Abu Hudhayfah had adopted Salim before adoption was prohibited—that is, he had taken him as his son, and Salim became exactly like a son to him. He would enter the house, and Abu Hudhayfah’s wife did not observe hijab before him. When Allah abolished adoption, Salim became a non-mahram man to the woman. So Sahlah came to complain to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, saying: “Salim had been adopted by Abu Hudhayfah; he comes into our home and we speak with him, but adoption has now been abolished.” The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said to her: “Nurse him, and he will become unmarriageable to you.” (1) He was already an adult, attending to people’s needs. They therefore argued: he was nursed as an adult, and the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, ruled that it had legal effect. Consideration is given to the generality of the wording, not to the particularity of the reason for which it was stated.
Accordingly, if a woman wished to uncover before a certain man, she could say to him: “Come; I want to uncover before you, be alone with you, and travel with you—so nurse!”
There remains the difficulty of how he is to nurse from her breast when he is not her mahram. If a twenty-year-old man were to nurse directly from her breast, temptation would undoubtedly result. We say: praise be to Allah, there is a way out. Each day, for five days, she may express for him a small amount of milk from her breast, and he may drink it; then he becomes her son. As you can see, this view involves a problematic ambiguity. Yet we say: the hadith concerning Salim conflicts with the explicit purport of the hadith: “No nursing has legal effect except that which develops the bones and occurs before weaning.” (2) They differed over how to answer this, and some said that it has been abrogated,