The Book of Fosterage (Riḍāʿ)

The legal effect of fosterage is established only through the breast-milk of a living woman who has reached nine years of age. If her milk is expressed while she is alive and then administered to the infant after her death, the prohibition is still incurred according to the sound view. The same applies when the milk is turned into cheese or butter.

If the milk is mixed with another liquid, the prohibition exists whenever the milk predominates. Should the other liquid predominate and the infant drink the entire mixture—indeed, even part of it according to the more apparent opinion—the prohibition is likewise incurred.

Administering the milk orally by pouring it into the child’s mouth (ījār) is sufficient to establish the prohibition, and introducing it through the nose (isʿāṭ) has the same ruling according to the school; introducing it rectally (ḥuqnah), however, does not establish the prohibition according to the stronger position.

The conditions are that the nursling be alive, under 2 years of age, and that he take 5 distinct sucklings, the measure of each being determined by custom. If he releases the breast and turns away, that interruption makes the next latch a separate suckling; but if he stops momentarily to play and resumes at once, or if he moves directly from one breast to the other, the count is not increased.

If milk is expressed in a single extraction and then fed to the child 5 times—or, conversely, expressed 5 times and fed once—this counts as a single suckling; another opinion counts it as 5.

If there is doubt whether there were 5 sucklings or fewer, or whether they occurred within the 2-year limit or after it, no prohibition is established. Concerning the second doubt there exists another opinion.

By these 5 sucklings the wet-nurse becomes the child’s mother, the person through whom the milk was generated becomes his father, and the prohibition extends to their children.

Suppose a man owns 5 slave-women who have borne him children, or he has 4 wives and a concubine; if a child suckles once from each of them, he becomes that man’s son according to the sound view, and all of those women become unlawful to him, for they are women with whom his father has had intercourse. If, instead of those concubines, the women were the man’s daughters or sisters, no prohibition results according to the sound view.

The wet-nurse’s fathers—whether by blood or by fosterage—become the child’s grandfathers; her mothers, his grandmothers; her children by blood or fosterage, his brothers and sisters; her brothers and sisters, his maternal uncles and aunts. The father of the milk-provider is the child’s grandfather, his brother the child’s paternal uncle, and the same pattern applies to the remaining relatives.

The milk is attributed to the man by whose lawful marriage or intercourse under mistaken assumption (shubha) the child who caused the lactation was conceived, not to a fornicator. If that man repudiates the child through liʿān, the milk is no longer ascribed to him.

Should a married woman be accessed through mistaken intercourse, or two men cohabit with her