Imagine a child born into a world that denies them a single, loving father—instead forcing upon them the shame of multiple “official fathers”: the men who, one after another, raped their mother under the sanction of Islamic law.
According to Sharia, when a slave woman was jointly owned by two or more men, she could be subjected to serial rape. Each owner took his turn after a short waiting period of three to seven days (to ensure she was free of menstruation). This horrific system not only destroyed the woman’s dignity but inflicted a permanent wound on her child, whose true paternity became impossible to determine—since a child could be born anywhere from six to over nine months after conception.
Rather than protect the mother or child, Islamic jurists devised a cold, legal fiction: all joint owners who had relations with the mother were declared the child’s “combined official fathers.” This erased the child’s real lineage and legally bound them to the very men who had violated their mother.
Imam Ibn Qudamah in Al-Mughni clearly describes this practice: “If a slave woman is shared between two partners and both have intercourse with her, she must observe two waiting periods (istibra’).”
This waiting period was purely procedural—ensuring each man’s turn while offering no real protection from repeated assault. The child born from this nightmare faced an even deeper injustice, as explained in Fatawa-e-Alamgiri (a foundational Hanafi text taught widely in South Asia):
“If two men jointly own a slave woman and a child is born, and both claim paternity, then both are considered the (official) fathers of that child.”
The cruelty intensifies in another ruling from the same text: “Imam Abu Hanifa said: If a slave woman is jointly owned by three, four, or five men, and all claim paternity of the child, then all of them are his (official) fathers… Imam Muhammad stated in Ziyadat: If a slave woman shared by two men gives birth to a child six months or more after they became her owners, and then gives birth to another child six months or more after the first, and one owner claims the younger child is his while the older belongs to the co-owner—and the co-owner agrees—then the lineage of the younger child is established with the claimant, and the woman becomes his Umm Walad.”
This legal sleight-of-hand turned a child’s identity into a bargaining chip. Their existence was defined not by love or truth, but by the competing claims of men who profited from their mother’s suffering. A slave woman—already repeatedly violated—was further dehumanized as her child’s paternity was divided among her abusers. Even the status of Umm Walad offered no genuine protection; her body remained a commodity, and her child a product of systematic exploitation.
This was not a marginal opinion—it was mainstream jurisprudence preserved in the most authoritative Islamic legal texts. For centuries, enslaved women and their children lived under this nightmare: mothers subjected to serial rape, children robbed of a clear father, their lineage legally fragmented among predators.
This is not merely history. It is a stark indictment of a system that placed property rights and male desire above the most fundamental human bonds—motherhood, identity, and dignity.
