(Some scholars have taken this ḥadith—meaning the report of Abū Qatādah—as evidence that children may be brought into the mosque. That deduction, however, is open to objection, for it is possible that the child had been left in a house close to the mosque so that his crying could still be heard.)

I reply: Such a possibility is far-fetched, all the more so because the first report of Anas states: “He would hear the child’s cry while the child was with his mother,” which clearly—and indeed explicitly—indicates that the child was in the mosque with his mother. The mentioned conjecture therefore falls away.

Taken together, these narrations establish the permissibility of bringing children into the mosques, even very small ones who still stumble as they walk, and even when there is a likelihood that they may cry. The Prophet ﷺ approved this practice and did not censure it; rather, he instituted that the imams shorten their recitation when a child cries, so that its mother is not distressed.

One of the underlying wisdoms here is to accustom the youngsters to obedience and to attending the congregational prayer from their earliest days. The scenes they observe in the mosque, and what they hear there—of dhikr, Qur’an recitation, takbīr (proclaiming “Allāhu akbar”), taḥmīd (saying “al-ḥamdu li-llāh”), and tasbīḥ (saying “subḥān Allāh”)—leave a powerful imprint on their hearts, often without their realizing it, an impression that endures, or is hard to efface, when they reach adulthood and enter the arena of life with all its attractions.

In the same vein is the practice of giving the adhān in the newborn’s ear. The erudite Ibn al-Qayyim, in Tuhfat al-Mawlūd, said:

“The secret of the adhān—Allah knows best—is that the very first sound to strike a person’s hearing should be those ordered phrases that proclaim the Lord’s majesty and greatness, together with the testimony through which one first enters Islam …”