Wa'ada (Classical Arabic)Means: to bury one's infant daughter alive.
Being a parent is hard work, because children are like little parasites who take everything they can from you (time, money, natural resources) and produce nothing in return. But we love them anyway, because for all the hard work it takes to be a parent, it's the most fulfilling job in the world (and also we're evolutionarily programmed to do so).
But this was less true among the tribes of pre-Islamic Arab people. They didn't specifically hate the idea of raising children, but the thought of giving birth to a girl was so abhorrent that they devised a horrific method to avoid it, post-factum. This method was called wa'ada, and you may want to take a tiny break to go roll around in a giant pile of puppies before we continue.
When it came time to give birth, the expectant mother retreated to a ditch and waited there for her progeny to come screaming out of her vagina. If the baby was a boy, she swaddled him up and returned proudly back to her friends and neighbors. If the child was a girl, the mother would simply leave the girl in the ditch and unceremoniously fill it with dirt, burying the baby alive on the spot and thus avoiding the nasty social consequences of having produced female offspring.
This abysmal practice continued until a certain famous women's rights activist and perpetrator of reason came along and catapulted Arabic society into modern times. We're of course talking about Muhammad, beard enthusiast and prophet extraordinaire, who had a thing or two to say about wa'ada. Well, just one thing, really, which can be paraphrased as "That's freaking crazy, please knock it off." The spread of Islam abolished the unholy practice and upgraded a woman's worth from "broodmare" to ... um, as good as one-fourth of a man, in marriage. Still, that's progress, right? |
