ancient arabians were cannibalistic—daughters too expensive to rear—conditions before the coming of the prophet—the injunctions of mohammed—his law as found in “al hidaya.”
of the one remaining tribe of the semites, a name that has meant so much to the civilization of the world, it is hardly necessary to offer a prelude. coming, however, in the mouth of the defenders of the latest religion and as the youngest of the semitic languages, it is necessary to say of the arabic language that it is nearer akin than any of the others to the original archetype, the ursemitisch, from which they are all derived; “just as the arabs, by reason of their geographical situation and the monotonous uniformity of the desert life, have, in some respects, preserved the semitic character more purely and exhibited it more distinctly than any people of the same family.”252
arabic history divides itself into three periods, first the sabean and himyarite period, from 800 b. c., the date of the oldest south arabic inscription;170 second, the pre-islamic period, 500 to 622 a. d.; and third, the mohammedan period, beginning with the flight, or hijra (or hegira). of the first periods the little that we know except the inscriptions coming to us by tradition is preserved in the pre-islamic poems and the koran.253
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the second period is known as the jahiliyya, or age of ignorance or barbarism, and, in the ample remnant of the poetry of that day, we are enabled “to picture the life of those wild days in its larger aspects, accurately enough.”254
the pagan arabs had long been in the habit of burying their infant daughters alive, the excuse offered being that it cost too much to marry them and that their lives were too closely attended with the possibility of disgrace “if they should happen to be made captives or to become scandalous by their behaviour.”255 for these reasons there was never any disguising the fact that the birth of a daughter was considered a great misfortune and the death of one a great happiness.
according to one authority, the method em172ployed by the arabs to get rid of the female infant was to have the mother who was about to give birth to a child lie down by a pit when she was about to deliver the child, and if it was a daughter, it was thrown into the pit without any more ado.256
another version is that when a daughter was born the father, if he intended to keep her, would have her clothed in a garment of wool or hair as an indication that later he intended to have her keep camels or sheep in the desert. if, on the other hand, he intended to do away with her, he would allow her to live until she was six years of age, and then said to her mother:
“perfume her and adorn her, that i may carry her to her mothers.”
this being done, he led her to a well or pit that had previously been dug for that purpose, pushed her into it, and then, filling the pit, levelled it with the rest of the ground. it does not seem that the latter practice could have been other than rare.
al mostatraf is quoted by sale as saying that these practices were common throughout arabia, and that the tribes of koreish and kendah were particularly notorious in this respect. the members of the former tribe were in the habit of burying their daughters alive in mount abu dalama, near mecca.
among the pre-islamitic arabians, the people173 of tamim were noted for their addiction to this practice and claimed, in after years, that it was brought about by the action of their chief, qays, who was a contemporary of the prophet. according to this story, moshamraj the yashkorite descended on the camp of qays and carried off, among other women, the daughter of the sister of qays. this captive was assigned to the son of moshamraj, and when her uncle appeared to ransom her, she declined to leave her new-found husband. qays was so incensed over this action that, on returning home, he is said to have killed all of his daughters by burying them alive, and never thereafter allowed another daughter to live.
during his absence some time later, his wife gave birth to a daughter, and knowing the feeling of the father she sent the infant to some relatives to have the child raised in secrecy. when qays returned home she told him that she had given birth to a dead child.
years after, when the child had grown up, she came to visit her mother and while the two were together they were discovered by qays.
“i came in,” related qays himself to mohammed, “and saw the girl; her mother had plaited her hair, and put rings in the side locks and strung them with sea shells and put on a chain of cowries, and given her a necklace of dried dates. i said:
“‘who is this pretty girl?’ and her mother wept and said:
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“‘she is your daughter’; and told me how she had saved her alive.
“so i waited until the mother ceased to be anxious about her; then i led her out one day, dug a pit and laid her in it, she crying:
“‘father, what are you doing with me?’
“then i covered her up with the earth and still she cried:
“‘father, are you going to bury me? are you going to leave me alone and go away?’ but i went on filling in the earth till i could hear her cries no longer, and that is the only time that i felt any pity when i buried a daughter.”257
there were others however before qays who did not take this attitude toward children. sa’sa’a, the grandfather of the poet al-farazdac, frequently redeemed female children that were about to be buried alive. inasmuch as he too was of the tribe of tamim his action would indicate that qays was not an innovator. in order to save them he was obliged to buy them off and the price he paid every time was two she-camels, big with young, and one he-camel.258
boasting of this humane action on the part of his ancestor (who was the fran?ois villon of his day) al-farazdac vauntingly declared one day before the khalifs of the family of omayya:
“i am the son of the giver of life to the dead.”
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when he was reproved for this boasting he justified it by quoting the koran:
“he who saveth a soul alive shall be as if he had saved the souls of all mankind.”259
the aghani explains the practice on the ground of poverty and credits sa’sa’a with being the first one to attempt to put an end to the practice. thereafter this humane grandparent of a vagabond poet was known as muhiyyu’l-maw’udat, or “he who brings buried girls to life.” according to the kamil he saved as many as one hundred and eighty daughters.260
that infanticide was rare in the desert is the claim made by defenders of the faith. the following verses are quoted by lane as going to show that the arabs really had a tender feeling toward their women and their children; and that infanticide, which is commonly attributed to the whole arab nation of every age before islam, was in reality exceedingly rare in the desert, and after almost dying out only revived about the time of mohammed. it was probably adopted by poor and weak clans, either from inability to support their children, or in order to protect themselves from the stain of having their children dishonoured by stronger tribes, and the occasional practice of this barbarous and suicidal custom affords no ground for assuming an unnatural hatred and contempt for176 girls among the ancient arabs. these verses of a father to his daughter tell a different story:
if no umaymah were there, no want would trouble my soul, no labour call me to toil for bread through pitchiest night;
what moves my longing to live is but that well do i know how low the fatherless lies, how hard the kindness of kin.
i quake before loss of wealth lest lacking fall upon her, and leave her shieldless and bare as flesh set forth on a board.
my life she prays for, and i from mere love pray for her death—yea, death, the gentlest and kindest guest to visit a maid.
i fear an uncle’s rebuke, a brother’s harshness for her; my chiefest end was to spare her heart the grief of a word.
once more, the following lines do not breathe the spirit of infanticide:
fortune has brought me down (her wonted way) from station great and high to low estate;
fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth, honour alone is left.
fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did fortune make me laugh with what she gave!
but for these girls, the kata’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard,
far would i roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length;
177nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they walking on the ground?
if but the wind blow harsh on one of them, mine eye says no to slumber all night long.261
that the custom was deep-rooted when mohammed arrived on the scene is evident from the fact that ozaim the fazarite, according to abu tamman, when he decided to save his daughter lacita, had to conceal that fact from his people, although she was his only child.262
hunger and famine were undoubtedly the main causes of the practice of getting rid of the female children, although according to porphyry a boy was sacrificed at dumat-al jandal263 and other arabs sacrificed a virgin annually.
the cannibalistic strain is re-occurring. in the year 378 a. d. a body of saracens attacking the goths before constantinople gave an example of this side of the arabs.
“both the goths and the saracens were parting on equal terms,” says ammianus marcellinus, when “a strange and unprecedented incident gave the final advantage to the eastern warriors; for one of them with long hair, naked—with the exception of a covering around his waist,—shouting a hoarse and melancholy cry, drew his178 dagger and plunged into the middle of the gothic host, and after he had slain an enemy, put his lips to his throat and sucked his blood. the barbarians [the goths] were terrified at this marvellous prodigy and from that time forth when they proceeded on any enterprise, displayed none of their former and usual ferocity, but advanced with hesitating steps.”264
the last line almost leads one to believe that the wily arab might have been impelled not so much by the cannibalistic strain as by cunning and generalship.
procopius, in his account of the wars of justinian, speaks of the far-off saracens as anthropophagous,265 and according to one arabian authority at medina they licked the blood of the man who had been killed in blood revenge. another custom coming undoubtedly from cannibalistic times is the vow of the mother to drink wine from the skull of the slayer of her son.266
these were the conditions that mohammed undoubtedly ended by his preaching.
“come, i will rehearse that which your lord hath forbidden ye; that is to say that ye be not guilty of idolatry and that ye show kindness to your parents and that ye murder not your children for fear lest ye be reduced to poverty: we will provide for you and them; and draw not near179 unto heinous crimes, neither openly nor in secret slay the soul which god hath forbidden you to slay unless for a just cause.”267
this, jalal-ad-din says, was revealed at medina:
“by god, ye shall surely be called to account for that which ye have falsely devised. they attributed daughters unto god but unto themselves children of the sex which they desire. and when any of them is told the news of the birth of a female, his face becometh black, and he is deeply afflicted: he hideth himself from the people, because of the ill tidings which have been told him; considering within himself whether he shall keep it with disgrace, or whether he shall bury it in the dust.”268
and again he says: “kill not your children for fear of being brought to want: we will provide for them and for you: verily, killing them is a great sin.” and finally he says: “when the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the wild beasts shall be gathered together; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death.”269
wherever the arab went, he carried his religion180 and his law. and, bloodthirsty as he was in war, it is to his credit that much was done to check infanticide wherever the mussulman reigned. the extent to which the law on children was regulated by the arabs at a time when europe was in darkness may be seen in “al hidaya,” by shaykh burhan-ad-din ali, who died a.h. 591 and was, according to his contemporaries, a distinguished author on jurisprudence.
the hidaya consists of extracts from a number of the great works on mussulman jurisprudence in which the authorities on different opinions are set forth together with reasons for preferring any one adjudication.270 in this work an entire book is devoted to the laqeets, which, it is explained, signified, in the primitive sense, anything lifted from the ground, but later came to mean an abandoned child, and, in the law of the arab, had come to mean a child that had been cast out from fear of poverty or for other reasons.271
here it is stated that, when the finder sees a laqeet under circumstances which suppose that if it is not taken up it may perish, it is not only praiseworthy to adopt a child, but it is incumbent.
coming centuries after christ, it is noteworthy to observe that mohammed was able to instil into his followers such humane doctrines as the freedom of the foundling and its maintenance from181 the funds drawn from the public treasury at a time when the christians of europe were groping vainly as to the proper treatment of infants.
“a foundling is free,” says the shaykh burhan-ad-din ali, “because freedom is a quality originally inherent in man; and the mussulman territory in which the infant is found is a territory of freemen, whence it is also free: moreover, freemen, in a mussulman territory, abound more than slaves, whence the foundling is free, as the smaller number is dependent to the greater.”272
christian philosophy offers few more striking mixtures of humanity and democracy. it was also the law when the foundling was to be maintained, the expense of bringing up the child was to be paid out of the public treasury, and in favor of this law the opinion of omar was cited. a very good reason given for this was that “where the foundling dies without heirs, his estate goes to the public treasury.”
the person who took up the foundling was known as a multaqit and it was the law of that day that the multaqit could not exact any return from the foundling on account of maintenance except where he had been ordered by the magistrate to bring up the foundling at its own expense, in which case the maintenance “is a debt upon the foundling, because, the magistrate’s authority being absolute, he is empowered to exact the return from the foundling.”273
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according to al-quduri,274 this was the proper thing to do as the letting out was regarded as conducive to the education of the laqeet. in the jami saghir the hiring out of the foundling was opposed on the ground that the multaqit had no right to turn the faculties of his foundling to his own advantage. the opinion of shaykh burhan-ad-din ali was that al-quduri was right and that the child did gain by being let out.
in al-siyar there is given a specific injunction that children must not be slain:
“it does not become mussulmans to slay women or children or men that are aged, bed-ridden, or blind, because opposition and fighting are the only occasions which make slaughter allowable (according to our doctors), and such persons are incapable of these.”275
in the minute instructions in regard to divorce, much care is given as to the disposition of a child. where the husband and wife separate, the law was that the child went with the mother, and this was based on a decision of the prophet.
“it is recorded that a woman once applied to the prophet, saying ‘o, prophet of god! this is my son, the fruit of my womb, cherished in my bosom and suckled at my breast, and his father is desirous183 of taking him away from me into his own care’; to which the prophet replied, ‘thou hast a right in the child prior to that of thy husband, so long as thou dost not marry with a stranger.’”276
if the mother of an infant died, the right of hidana, or infant education, rested with the maternal grandmother. so deeply was this idea imbued that even if the mother were a hated zimmi or female infidel subject, married to a mussulman, she was still entitled to the hidana of her child until the time when the child was capable of forming a judgment with respect to religion. when such a time arrived the child was generally taken from the mother if she continued to be an infidel, in order that no injury might come to it from imbibing the doctrines of a zimmi.
