> [!cite] > El Guindi, Fadwa. ‘Milk Kinship’. In *The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology*, edited by Hilary Callan. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. [https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1358](https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1358). > [!abstract] > International Encyclopedia of Anthropology Abstract Milk kinship is a designation which refers to social practices sharing the feature in which infants are breastfed by lactating women who are not their birth mothers. Historically these practices were widespread in the Mediterranean, Arabian and Balkan regions, and among contemporary Shi’a and Sunni groups. While predating Islam, Islamic sources legitimized the practice and regulated it in kinship terms of prohibition and avoidance. Recent field research contributed insights that explicitly define the parameters proposed to empirically establish admissibility or inadmissibility of milk kinship practices within the anthropological kinship category. --- ‘Strictly speaking, neither fosterage nor wet-nursing alone, although classified as milk kinship by some scholars, are to be considered kinship in Arab culture.’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 2)]] ^fbc08a ‘Milk kinship is a common scholarly designation that refers to apparently similar practices that share the feature of breastfeeding in which infants are nursed by lactating women who are not their birth mothers (or *genetrix*) and social and/or kinship links are thereby created.’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 1)]] ^ebc5ae ‘Sources show that Islam did not introduce milk practices to Arabia. Fosterage, wet-nursing, and suckling kinship had been practices that existed already.’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 1)]] ‘However, Islam regulated their parameters, primarily through the reference to them in a single verse of the Quran (4:23) which established dyadic links forged through suckling as being subject to rules of marriage prohibition and avoidance in the same way as with birth and marital links, thus legitimizing milk practices as kinship.’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 1)]] ^332a7e ‘A study conducted in Lebanon focusing on new reproductive technologies used official Islamic and medical authorities to show the continued vitality of these ideas in contemporary Islamic legal thinking (Clarke 2007).’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 2)]] ‘Islamic discourse thus identifies three sorts of kinship relation, designated by three distinct Arabic terms: *nasab* (kinship through procreation), *musahara* (kinship through marriage), and *rida’a* (kinship through suckling). Wet-nursing is distinguished terminologically as *istirda*.’ [[El Guindi,‘Milk Kinship’, 2018|(El Guindi 2018, 2)]] ^7b3cb2