The fly hadith and the adult suckling report: 4 points

Before taking any single report, it helps to know how Muslim scholars sorted the Prophet’s words. When his advice on pollinating date palms produced a poor crop, he told the farmers that they knew better about their worldly affairs. Imam Muslim placed the report in a chapter on the duty to obey what the Prophet said as religion, as distinct from what he said on worldly matters by way of opinion.^[1]

That distinction governs how the two reports below have been read. The first concerns household hygiene. The second concerns a single ruling of family law, which the Prophet’s own wives treated as an exception.

Abu Hurayra reported that the Prophet said that if a housefly falls into a drink, one should dip it in and then remove it, because one of its wings carries a disease and the other its cure.^[2] Al-Bukhari placed the report in the Book of the Beginning of Creation, under the heading of a fly falling into a drink.^[2]

Critics treat the report as a medical claim and test it against modern microbiology. The text gives an instruction for a common situation in seventh-century Arabia, where drinks stood open and a fly in a cup was routine. Ibn Hajar, in his commentary on the report, calls the command to dip the fly an instruction of guidance (amr irshad), a counsel meant to set the remedy against the harm, and not an act of worship.^[3] He also records a version, narrated by Abu Dawud and graded sound by Ibn Hibban, in which the fly shields itself with the wing that carries the disease, so that the wing carrying the cure is the one that goes in last, and he explains the word “disease” there as poison.^[3] Nothing in the report obliges anyone to drink from a cup a fly has touched. Read through the principle above, a remark of this kind falls under worldly matters, where the Prophet himself told his companions that they knew best. A Muslim who pours the drink away breaks no rule of religion.

Sahla bint Suhayl told the Prophet that her husband Abu Hudhayfa was unhappy when Salim, Abu Hudhayfa’s client (mawla, a freed dependant attached to his household), came into their home. Salim was by then a grown man who had fought at Badr. The Prophet told her to nurse him so that he would become her foster son and unlawful to her in marriage. She asked how, since he was a grown man, and the Prophet smiled and said that he knew it.^[4] She later reported that she did so and that the unease in Abu Hudhayfa’s heart went away.^[5]

The context is the Quran’s command to call adopted sons by the names of their own fathers, which ended adoption as a legal tie of kinship.^[6] The ruling gave Salim, who had long been part of the household, a lawful family bond with Sahla. The report does not say how the milk was given, and a narrator in the chain, Ibn Abi Mulayka, said that he held back from narrating it for about a year out of caution.^[7]

Umm Salama reported that the other wives of the Prophet refused to let anyone enter their homes on the basis of such fostering, and told A’isha that they regarded it as a concession the Prophet had given to Salim alone.^[8] A’isha herself narrated the general rule that fosterage arises only from hunger, that is, in infancy, when milk is a child’s food. Al-Bukhari placed that report under the heading that there is no fosterage after two years.^[9]

The Quran sets the full period of nursing at two years.^[10] Read with A’isha’s report on hunger, that limit became the basis on which jurists held that nursing an adult creates no family tie. Critics who present the Sahla report as a general Islamic practice are describing a position that the Prophet’s own household rejected.