In this text, the Cordoban Ibn Abī Zamanīn (d. 399/1009) discusses the legal predicament in which a man denies his paternity of a child still in embryo after having already (either implicitly or explicitly) conceded it. Ibn Abī Zamanīn’s opinion is that such a denial is possible only if the man claims to have seen his wife in flagrante delicto with his own eyes (ruʾya) and if the resulting child is born more than six months after the accusation. In her chapter on imprecatory oaths in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Delfina Serrano uses this source to contrasts Ibn Abī Zamanīn’s opinion with that of Ibn Mughīth, who believed that rejecting a previously acknowledged child under any circumstances would constitute slander.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale (ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of sources and other material used in and related to the book