890 – Jābir (may Allah be pleased with him) said, “We used to practise withdrawal during the lifetime of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ while the Quran was being sent down, and had it been something that was to be forbidden, the Quran would certainly have forbidden us from it.” Agreed upon.

Muslim adds: “When that reached the Prophet of Allah ﷺ, he did not prohibit us from it.” (1)

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Vocabulary
• “while the Quran was being sent down”: a circumstantial clause indicating that revelation was still descending at that time.

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Points derived from the hadiths
1 – According to al-Nihāyah, al-ghīlah is derived from ghayl and means that a man has intercourse with his wife while she is breastfeeding; it also applies if she becomes pregnant while still nursing. The Arabs regarded this as objectionable, and physicians say it harms the suckling infant.
2 – The Prophet ﷺ considered prohibiting ghīlah on the basis of the medical opinions current in his day and the fact that the Arabs found it distasteful, but he ultimately did not do so.
3 – When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ looked at the peoples of Persia and Byzantium, he saw that they practised ghīlah, feeding their infants the milk of pregnant women, yet no harm befell them. Practical observation—“the ladder of the natural sciences”—showed that ghīlah did not harm the children of Persia and Byzantium; therefore he refrained from forbidding it.
4 – In Sunan Abū Dāwūd, Asmāʾ bint Yazīd reports that she heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say, “Do not kill your children secretly, for ghīlah overtakes the horseman and throws him from his mount,” meaning it topples and destroys him.