Islamic Fiqh > Marriage and family > Breastfeeding and its legal effects (rada'a)
Milk creates kinship: how many sucklings create the marriage impediment, who becomes milk-kin, and the schools' divergences.
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Updated on 25 September 2026 at 3:23 PM
This passage from the Encyclopedia of Islamic jurisprudence (al-Mawsua al-fiqhiyya) deals with the conditions of the breastfeeding that establishes the matrimonial prohibition: conditions relating to the wet nurse (being human, being adult, being alive), to the milk itself, to the nursling and to the duration of breastfeeding, and then to the required number of sucklings. It finally sets out the two means of proof of breastfeeding before the judge: acknowledgment and testimony. The positions of the four schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali) are reported with their classical references.
Al-Mughni by Ibn Qudama · Hanbali school
And the verse was explained by the Sunna, which clarified the breastfeeding that renders unlawful; and the explicit meaning of what we reported particularizes the derived meaning of what they reported. We therefore reconcile the reports and interpret them according to the explicit text we reported.
Chapter: if doubt falls upon the existence of breastfeeding, or upon the number of nursings that render unlawful: does it render unlawful or not? The prohibition is not established, for the principle is its absence, and one does not descend from the oath by doubt, as if he doubted the existence of the divorce or its number.
Al-Hawi al-Kabir by al-Mawardi · Shafi'i school
Chapter: the milk of the man and the woman. Question: al-Shafi'i, may Allah have mercy on him, said: "Milk belongs to the man and the woman as the child belongs to them both, and the nurse, by that milk, has as child their child."
Al-Mawardi said: this has already come at the beginning of the chapter, and we mentioned that the milk of nursing belongs to the man and the woman, and the one nursed thereby is the child of both. Dawud and the people of the apparent (zahirites) disagreed with that, attributing the milk to the woman to the exclusion of the man. And this question came complete, previously, to its end.
Question: al-Shafi'i, may Allah be pleased with him, said: "If she gives birth to a boy."