as though he were one of them, when in reality he is not.
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Such a woman is encompassed by Allah’s threat: Allah disowns her—she has no part with Him—and He will forbid her His Garden.
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The child who has been falsely attributed to the family is not truly one of them, yet he will, by sheer fraud, enjoy their rights and bear their duties: they will spend on him; he will inherit and be inherited from; he will see the household’s private matters; he will bring his own offspring into their midst; and he and his descendants will remain a perpetual curse upon the home and its people—all because of this immoral, brazen woman.
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Allah’s anger and punishment likewise befall the man who knows that the child is his yet denies and disowns him, thereby severing the child’s lineage so that he becomes homeless, without ancestry or kin, detested, stigmatized, and publicly disgraced.
Hence the recompense matches the deed: on the Day of Resurrection Allah will expose him before all creation, calling out his crime, disgracing him for his lies and calumny, and for abandoning the duties he owed to that forsaken child. -
If a person acknowledges a child even for a single moment, the child’s lineage is irrevocably established and he can never thereafter repudiate him. Al-Iqnāʿ states: “One of the conditions for denying paternity is that the man must repudiate the child immediately upon learning of its birth, without delay. If he postpones the denial, he no longer has the right to disown the child after having remained silent, for that would be a retraction of his acknowledgment in a matter that concerns a human being, and such a retraction is not accepted.” This corresponds to the meaning of hadith no. 957. Allah knows best.