Foundlings Ordeal
The Crisis of Abandoned Children
The most horrific is the child deprived of both
motherhood and fatherhood—while both parents are alive and well. They lived
together and enjoyed intimacy without the protection of a lawful marriage
contract, behind the back of society. When pregnancy occurred and the time of
birth arrived, the man fled, and the woman could not bear to face society. So,
she left her newborn in the middle of the road, or handed the baby over to an
orphanage. The child grew up as an orphan of living parents—unknown lineage,
unclaimed by a father to protect or give him a name, nor embraced by a family
to belong to, nor held by a mother to her chest and wrapped in her arms. This
is the tragedy of “foundlings”, whose only “crime” is the lust of their fathers
and mothers.
The Extended Duration of Human
Childhood
Human childhood is the longest and most
demanding of all species. Among animals and birds, many are ready to move and
navigate life immediately after birth, like the calf that stands on its legs as
soon as it is born, or the chick which, as the saying goes, “comes out of the
egg chirping.”
But Allah, the Exalted, has made it such that
the human being requires prolonged care, training, teaching, discipline,
upbringing, and refinement before he can walk, speak, express himself,
understand, discern, and learn. This requires a significant period of time
during which the child must remain under the care of two parents who nurture,
teach, and gradually train him until he is able to stand on his own.
Hence arises the responsibility of the parents
who brought him into the world—responsibility not just for his material needs,
but also for his moral and spiritual development.
The first obligation upon parents is to
breastfeed their child, a duty naturally fulfilled by the mother, driven by the
undeniable instinct of motherhood. It is no surprise that Allah has placed this
instinct in the mother's chest so that her milk would nourish her child at a
stage where he has no teeth to chew or stomach strength to digest solid food.
Yet modern civilization has whispered to women
that they should withhold their milk from their infants and rely instead on
formula feeding, in order to preserve the slimness of their figure and the
firmness of their chest.
But formula can never replace natural
breastfeeding. True breastfeeding is not merely about delivering milk to the
baby’s stomach; it is something far greater and deeper. It is an attachment to
the mother’s chest, a sense of warmth and tenderness as she embraces her child,
placing him to her breast where he draws his material nourishment and, from the
heat of her heart and emotions, his emotional nourishment as well. No
artificial milk can ever equal the milk of a mother.
Book
Review: “The Family as Desired by Islam” by Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
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Taken from the book: “The
Family as Desired by Islam”
