Q. After 12 years of marriage, we remain childless. We have consulted medical experts and resorted to different ways of treatment, but we have come to the conclusion that God in His wisdom has made us of the type who do not have a child of their own. We, therefore, want to foster a child, bringing it up and giving it a comfortable life. However, the rules of the country where we live do not allow us to bring the child with us unless we show evidence that it is ours. Some people suggested to us to arrange for a fake birth certificate in which we give the child our family name. We are aware of the Islamic ruling on adoption and we do not wish to contravene it, but we have this stumbling block that practically ties up our hands, preventing us from doing what will be most gratifying to us and serving the interests of an orphan child. Please advise.
(Name and address withheld)
A. This is a problem of our modern times, for which you find no answer in any book of Islamic law. The reason is that it was not faced by scholars of olden times, when people traveled without having to carry passports or other documents. Today, if a couple travel with a child that has a different surname, they are required to show evidence that the child’s family permits its travel with them. Otherwise, they may be accused of kidnapping the child.
I have friends who were in a similar situation and came to the conclusion that they would not be having a child of their own. They used to visit some orphanages where they could help with child caring and give donations. On one such visit, the mistress of the orphanage showed them a newcomer: a two-year-old girl who had just lost her grandmother, after having lost all her family in a car accident. She was brought to the orphanage by the grandmother’s neighbors, because the child had no relative who would look after her. They looked at the girl, talked to her and played with her for a while. The girl kept moving with the woman and held her hand. When it was time for the couple to leave, the girl would not let go of the woman’s hand.
They asked the mistress if they could take her with them for a few days, and she agreed. By the next weekend, it was practically impossible for the couple and the girl to separate. The orphanage, the childcare authority in the country and the couple were all agreed that it would be best for the child to be fostered by the couple. They took her home and arranged the proper official documents for the child to be placed in their care.
They lived in a Muslim country where formal adoption is illegal.
Yet the couple did not realize that they would soon be facing a difficult problem. The man worked for an international organization and was based in a country other than his own.
When it was time for his summer holiday and the couple wanted to travel, it was extremely difficult for them to have a passport issued for the girl. They did not know any relatives of the child, and no one was her official guardian. The couple could not be given such status because they were foreigners. They eventually managed to have an official permission to take her out of the country for one trip only. When they traveled to their home country, they considered the problem. By now, the girl was as close to them as a child can be to its parents. She had no one to care for her other than them. The choice was to give her back to the orphanage or to claim her as their own. They decided on the latter, and managed to have a passport issued to her in their own country, giving her their family name. They brought her back with them to her country, carrying a foreign passport. Since then, they had no problems with the authorities anywhere. However, they told the girl, at an early age, that she was not their offspring. All their family people are aware of that. Their friends know the fact.
Have they done wrong? From the Islamic point of view, there is nothing wrong with what they did, because at no time did they claim the child as their own. They simply had to violate some official rules that would have severely restricted their action and prevented a very good act of benevolence which Islam strongly encourages.
Having said that, we must remember that official rules in such matters are always well intended. They look to preventing abuse. Hence, they should be observed wherever possible. Only when they result in hardship that cannot be easily overcome one may look at a different option.
However, the overriding purpose should always be doing what is good, kind and approved by Islam. The issue is not the name. What Islam prohibits is to claim the child as one’s own, thus giving it a false status. This is not a question of official papers, such as a birth certificate and a passport; it is a question of how the child is presented to the world and how other people look at it. If you present the child as your own, claiming that it was born to your wife, then this is forbidden. If the facts are known to all around you and you are only dealing with difficulties that may stand in the child’s progress in life, such as its schooling and movement, then it is acceptable.
