English translation
5758. Narrated Abū Hurairah رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهُ: Allāh's Messenger ﷺ gave his verdict about two ladies of the Hudhail tribe who had fought each other and one of them had hit the other with a stone. The stone hit her abdomen and as she was pregnant, the blow killed the child in her womb. They both filed their case with the Prophet ﷺ and he judged that the blood-money for what was in her womb, was a slave or a female slave. The guardian of the lady who was fined said, "O Allāh's Messenger! Shall I be fined for a creature that has neither drunk nor eaten, neither spoke nor cried? A case like that (1) (a) The word 'Hāma' may refer to a number of old traditions which Islām has abolished. In the pre-Islāmic period, Arabs used to say: "If a man is killed and not avenged, a worm comes out of his head and starts revolving around his grave and says, 'Water me! Water me!' And when the murdered man is avenged, it goes; otherwise it stays there." Such a worm was called Hāma. (b) Some say 'Hāma' means an owl. People used to draw an evil omen if it perched on the house of one of them. He would say: "This portends my death, or the death of one of my relatives." (c) Some say people used to claim that the bones of a dead person turned into a bird that could fly: and that was the Hāma. But the Prophet ﷺ denies all this and invites people to abandon all such superstitions. should be nullified.” On that the Prophet ﷺ said, “This is one of the brothers of foretellers(1).”