of women, menstruation, and childbirth. In such matters fewer than two female witnesses are not accepted; at least two are required. If the two witnesses are women, one of whom is the midwife and she is trustworthy, their testimony regarding the birth is valid. Their testimony to the newborn’s first cry (istihlal) is likewise accepted, while men’s testimony is not. Some scholars of Medina, however, allow only male testimony in the matter of the first cry. Our applied practice is that both childbirth and the first cry may be established by the testimony of women alone, without men. In matters that involve both sexes, the testimony of a single woman or a single man is inadmissible.
According to Mālik and his companions, the testimony of two women together with the claimant’s oath is accepted in financial cases, just as the majority of Ḥijāz scholars accept the testimony of one upright man along with the claimant’s oath. Two women may also testify in cases of nursing (raḍāʿ), even when this leads to the annulment of a marriage, just as they may testify in childbirth, which ends the waiting-period and turns a slave-girl into an umm walad—a category of emancipation. Their testimony alongside that of men is admissible for confirming the instalments of a manumission contract (kitābah), even though this results in emancipation.
ʿAbd al-Malik said: If a man swears that he will settle another man’s claim by a specified time, and afterward one man and two women testify that he has in fact paid, he is still deemed perjured, because women’s testimony is not accepted for lifting the charge of perjury. Others maintain that he is cleared of perjury once judgment is passed that the debt has been paid.
Mālik said: If a man frees his slave and then his creditor produces either one male witness together with two women or one witness plus an oath, the emancipation is revoked. Muḥammad ibn Maslama and Ismāʿīl ibn Isḥāq disagreed with him, interpreting his statement in a way that I do not deem necessary to detail here.
Women’s testimony is not admissible for declaring either men or women upright, nor for impugning them. Some of Mālik’s associates, reporting from him, nevertheless held that the testimony of upright women is admissible with respect to one another in