which was the source of the milk of both was one
and... the two sucklings had thus become as
though they were the children of the two women’s
husband” (1977, 414).
By enabling it to form the basis for a complex and
ramified network of impediments to marriage,
Islamic law made non-maternal breastfeeding play
an important role in much wider circles of social
life. Firstly, it influenced the way in which relations
between different families were established. Like
adoption in other societies, Islam emphasized the
importance of milk relationships as a means to cre-
ate legal pseudo-familial relations with people or
groups outside the original framework of kinship.
Breastfeeding was practiced in the early Islamic
community so as to broaden the network of rela-
tives on whom one could rely for assistance and
cooperation. Assuming that the Prophet Mu™am-
mad’s biographies reflect patterns of social behav-
ior in the first centuries of Islam, one may conclude
that wet nursing functioned as a means of creating
relations, for instance, between sedentary commu-
nities and the tribes of the desert. The Prophet’s
biography by Ibn Is™àq and Ibn Hishàm (eighth-
ninth centuries C.E.) gives detailed information
about the ancestry of Mu™ammad’s Beduin milk
parents – £alìma and her husband of the BanùSa≠d
b. Bakr – as if they were his blood parents. There
are indications to the effect that breastfeeding was
continually used for the purpose of establishing
relations between strange families. Ibn Bàbawayh,
the Shì≠ìscholar of the tenth century, no doubt had
this in mind when he distinguished between wet
nurses who offer their services to make a living and
those who seek nurslings to gain nobility and glory.
Second, by creating milk kinship with neighbors,
who often would be members of the same extended
family, non-maternal breastfeeding probably led to
a reduction in endogamous marriages, in any case
limited by the Qur±àn to patenal cousins only.
£adìthreports tell us how Muslims, including the
Prophet Mu™ammad himself, had to cancel mar-
riage plans, or even break off existing marriage ties,
because a milk relationship was found to exist
between the two people involved. A survey of the
fatwas section of Majallat al-Azhar, the monthly
periodical issued by al-Azhar University in Cairo,
shows that such situations are also familiar to
Muslim societies today. It seems that in early Islam
believers were encouraged to seek their marriage
partners beyond the boundaries of their own patri-
lineal-patrilocal extended families so as to consoli-
date a larger community based not only on blood
ties but also on common values and aims.
Third, establishing milk relationships with neigh-356 kinship: milk
boring families creates semi-private spaces which
allow women greater freedom of conduct, for in-
stance, to appear unveiled and do work like cook-
ing and washing clothes outside their houses.
It was the effect non-maternal nursing had in
obstructing the common practice of paternal cousin
marriages which probably aroused reservations
even among the early representatives of the “great
tradition” of Islam. Being loyal to local patrilineal-
patriarchal traditions, quite a few of them began to
look for ways to reduce the effect of the rules on
prohibitions of marriage. Thus, there are ™adìth
reports which exclude “suckling a grown-up”
(ri∂à≠at al-kabìr), claiming that as far as impedi-
ments to marriage are concerned only the suckling
of infants not older than two years, that is, suckling
intended to “stave off hunger” is effective. Two
years, the formal minimal period of nursing, ac-
cording to Qur±àn 2:233, is regarded as crucial for
the physical development of the infant. Establishing
the minimum number of suckling sessions that,
within the first two years of a nursling’s life, would
guarantee milk kinship was another source of dis-
cord. There was, on the one hand, the notion, based
on a literal interpretation of Qur±àn 4:23, that a sin-
gle suck, of even one drop of milk, was enough to
create impediment of marriage between the
nursling and its nurse and her relatives. On the
other hand, a group of ™adìthreports claimed that
no less than five, or even ten successive sucklings
are required to create milk bonds.
The tension between these two tendencies,
namely, to reduce the occurrence of the rules con-
cerning prohibitions of marriage by making bound-
ary conditions, on the one hand, and to stick to the
more comprehensive attitude of the ™adìthin this
regard, on the other, is well reflected in legal (shar≠ì)
writings. Muslim jurists in their collections of posi-
tive law (furù≠), fatwas, and nawàzil (real-life cases
and the way they resolve them) from the eighth-
ninth centuries onwards devoted long and detailed
discussions to milk kinship. This is in an environ-
ment of a fully developed Muslim urban civilization
outside the Arab peninsula, where mercenary pro-
fessional wet nursing, for instance, was probably
common within the circles of the elite. Among the
legal questions they dealt with in this context were:
is there symmetry between blood relationships and
milk relationships as far as prohibitions of marriage
are concerned or not? Are milk relationships cre-
ated between strange nurslings and the nurse’s
husband, the actual owner of the milk, and his rel-
atives? Which ways of transmitting milk from a
nurse to a nursling create an impediment to mar-
riage? Is it direct suckling from the nurse’s breast to