The meaning of one tenth of the mother’s Diyah

08/05/2011| IslamWeb

Question:

What dose it mean 1/10 of the diyah of the mother? What is Diyah? Does "mother" mean the one who was pregnant or mother of pregnant woman? Can i convert it in to UAE dirham value? If abortion was done within one month of pregnancy is it necessarily to pay 1/10 of Diyah of the mother? If no what is a Tawbah?

 

Fatwa:

 

All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad is His Slave and Messenger.

 

The Diyah is the money which is given to the person against whom a crime is committed on his soul or body. For instance, if a person kills someone, then the killer should pay money to the guardians of the killed person; this is in brief.

 

One-tenth of the Diyah of the mother means that if a crime is committed against the foetus and it was aborted, then the person who aborted it should pay money to the family of the foetus, and the value of this money is one-tenth of the value of the Diyah of the mother of the foetus.

 

If the mother of the foetus is a free Muslim, then the value of her Diyah is 500 Dinaars of gold, and the value of the Diyah of the foetus is one-tenth, which is 50 Dinaars of gold. One Dinaar of gold equals 4.25 grams. Therefore, the value of the Diyah of the foetus is 212,5 grams of gold.

 

Hence, you may ask how much these grams cost in Emirates Dirham. The jurists agreed that this amount should be paid on a foetus some limbs of which are formed. However, they differed if the abortion took place before this. The preponderant opinion we adopt in Islamweb is that it is an obligation to pay the Diyah of the foetus if 40 days passed after its conception, because after this period the foetus starts to shape, whereas before the forty days finish it is only some drops of mixed sperm and it is not an obligation to pay a Diyah when aborting it.

 

Allah Knows best.

 

Fatwa answered by: The Fatwa Center at Islamweb