Raḍāʿ or riḍāʿa is a technical term in SunniIslamic jurisprudence meaning "the suckling which produces the legal impediment to marriage of foster-kinship", and refers to the fact that under Sunni jurispurdence, a wet nurse is considered related to the infant she nurses. The term derives from the infinitive noun of the Arabic wordradiʿa or radaʿa. Often it is translated as "fosterage" or "milk kinship". The concept of radāʿ derives from Islamic and pre-Islamicnotions concerning the state of blood relations whereby a wet nurse and the baby she is nursing are deemed related to one another through the act of breastfeeding. One important consequence is that the wet nurse and her family are forbidden to marry the baby and members of the baby's family. Conversely, the milk-relationship allows usually forbidden familiarities between the two groups,. Thus, according to some Sahihhadith, nursing an adult male could be used as a workaround to Islamic gender segregation, so that a male may be allowed in proximity to the nursing woman, her sisters and her daughters.
Radāʿ receives extensive treatment in the Islamic jurisprudence of the classical jurists. A primary feature of such works is the delineation of which relationships are subject to prohibition once the milk relationship is established. The following are the sorts of questions directed to the founder of the Hanbalischool of jurisprudence by his son: Other common topics included the following:
laban al-fahl, "milk of the sire", as under Islam the wet nurse's husband is considered the actual owner of her milk, which ties of consanguinity exist between his relations and the nursling?
sifat al-radāʿ al-muharrim, "quality of the milk", which ways of transmission create consanguinity?
ʿadad al-radāʿ al-muharrim, minimal number of sucklings necessary to establish fosterage;
radāʿ al-kabīr, suckling of a grown-up person, the maximum age at which the milk-relationship may be established;
al-radāʿ min mayyita, whether or not the absorption of milk from a dead woman creates the impediment.
ʿAdad al-radāʿ al-muharrim, or minimal number of sucklings necessary to establish the milk-kinship, was the subject of extensive debate and ever more elaborate exegetical theorizing. For the adherents of older schools of law, such as the Malikis and Hanafis, one suckling was enough. Others, such as the Shāfi'īs, maintained that the minimum number was five or ten, and that in fact a Qur'ainic verse had once stipulated this exact number until its wording had been expurgated from the Qur'ānic text. The following tradition treats both this topic as well as that of radāʿ al-kabīr, or suckling of an adult: For most jurists, the bar to marriage was effective only if the nursling was an infant. Yet even these allowed that a new relationship resulted between the two; Ibn Rushd, for example, ruled that the woman could now comport herself more freely in front of the nursed adult male, such as appearing before him unveiled. The famous traditionistMuhammad al-Bukhari was forced to resign his position of mufti and leave the city ofBukhara after ruling that two nurslings who suckled from the same farm animal became milk-siblings.
Shia
As per Quranic guidelines, non-mahram people are forbidden for each other as long as they are not legally married. Shi'ite Islam prohibits marriage to the consanguineous kin of a milk-parent. In Shi'ite societies, the wet nurse was always from a subordinate group, so that marriage to her kin would not have been likely.
Examples
Egypt
In May 2007 Dr. Izzat Atiyya, lecturer at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, issued a fatwa that suggested that male and female colleagues could use breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together. The fatwa said that if a woman fed a male colleague "directly from her breast" at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. "Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage," he ruled. "A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed." The fatwa sparked outrage and embarrassment, with critics deriding the author on Egyptian television. The university suspended the lecturer, who headed the university's hadith department. The fatwa was widely publicized by Arabic-language satellite television channels and was discussed in the Egyptian parliament. After being threatened with disciplinary action by the university, Atiyya issued a retraction, saying the fatwa was "a bad interpretation of a particular case" during the time of Muhammad and that it was based on the opinions of only a minority of scholars. Egypt's minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud Zaqzouq, has called for future fatwas to "be compatible with logic and human nature".
Saudi Arabia
In 2010, a clerical adviser to the Royal court and Ministry of Justice issued a fatwa suggesting that women should provide breast milk to their employed drivers thereby making them relatives. The driver could then be trusted to be alone with the woman. The fatwa was ridiculed by women campaigners.
