The Qur'an and Putative Pre-Islamic Practice of Female Infanticide

In this study, I take issue with one alleged characteristic of pre-Islamic Arabia: namely, the notion that Arabians frequently, and disturbingly, practiced female infanticide by burying their daughters alive. 1 This is what the Islamic-era scholars inferred on the basis of two qurʾanic passages (Q al-Naḥl 16:57–59 and al-Takwīr 81:8–9). For example, commenting on Q 81:8, al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1035) offers a verbose and graphic description of the putative practice: When a man had a daughter and he wanted to spare her life, he would dress her in a garment of wool or hair, and [when she had grown up] she would watch over his camels and sheep in the steppe. If he wanted to kill her, he would let her live until she was six spans in length ( sudāsiyyah ) and then say to her mother, “Perfume and adorn her, for I will take her to meet her relatives.” [Instead,] he had dug a pit for her in the desert where he would take her. He would say to her, “Look there.” Then he would push her into it from her back and pour earth over her until the ground was even … And Ibn ʿAbbās has said that when a pregnant woman was about to give birth during the jāhiliyyah , she would dig a grave and give birth next to it. If it was a daughter, she would cast her in the grave, and if it was a son, she would keep him. 2