Thus Noah, peace be upon him, prayed for their destruction to avert their future evil. On this interpretation, the boy was not a disbeliever before he actually came to disbelieve.

As for Ibn ʿAbbās’s statement, “The boy was a disbeliever, whereas his parents were believers,” its apparent meaning is that he was already a disbeliever at that time.

As for interpreting the Prophet’s words, peace and blessings be upon him,

“So his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian,”

as referring merely to assigning the child his parents’ status under worldly rulings, rather than meaning that they alter his natural disposition, this contradicts what the hadith indicates. For he compared parents’ making children disbelievers to the mutilation of livestock, likening one alteration to another.

Moreover, he related this hadith when they killed the children of the polytheists, forbidding them to kill them and saying:

“Are not the best among you the children of polytheists? Every child is born upon the natural disposition.”

Had he meant that the child follows his parents’ status in this world, this would have been an argument in their favour. They could have said, “They are disbelievers like their fathers, so we may kill them.”

A young child follows his father’s status under worldly rulings only because this is necessary for his life in this world. He must have someone to raise him, and it is his parents who raise him; he therefore follows their status out of necessity. Hence, whenever he is taken captive separately from them, he follows his captor’s status according to the majority of scholars, including Abū Hanīfah, al-Shāfiʿī, Ahmad, al-Awzāʿī, and others, because it is the captor who raises him.

If he is taken captive apart from one of his parents, or together with both, the scholars differ concerning his status.