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 near 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 religion 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 from 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]