Book of Breast-Feeding

Everything that is forbidden on account of lineage is likewise forbidden on account of breast-feeding. The milk that establishes this prohibition is: five separate nursings within the first two lunar years, the nasal instillation of milk (saʿūṭ), oral force-feeding (wujūr), the milk of a deceased woman, the milk of a woman who has been sexually accessed on the basis of mistaken legitimacy¹, of a defective or void contract, or of fornication, and milk that has been mixed with another substance². By contrast, the milk of an animal, or of a woman who is neither pregnant nor previously cohabited, carries no legal effect.

Whenever a woman breast-feeds an infant, he becomes her child with respect to marriage eligibility, the permissibility of looking and seclusion, and all rulings of maḥram status. He also becomes the child of the man to whom her milk is attributed by reason of pregnancy or lawful intercourse, and everyone who is forbidden to that man in marriage³ is likewise forbidden to the nursling. In the same way, all those who are forbidden to the wet nurse become forbidden to him⁴, in addition to his own parents and their ascendants and descendants. Consequently, the wet nurse remains lawful for the infant’s natural father and his full brother, and the infant’s natural mother and sister remain lawful for the milk-father and his brother.

If a man is forbidden to marry a woman’s daughter and she then breast-feeds another girl, that girl also becomes forbidden to him; if she is already his wife, the marriage is annulled.

Any woman who renders her own marriage void through breast-feeding before consummation is entitled to no dower; the same applies when a young girl crawls⁵ over and suckles from a sleeping woman. After consummation, however, her full dower remains due. If someone else invalidates the marriage, she is entitled against the husband to half of the specified dower that had been incumbent upon him before the invalidation,