ABSTRACT
In the House of Islam, dhimmi wet nurses were strongly disapproved by legal experts, while in 1268 in a collection of the laws of a Spanish city under the Christian rule, we find a prohibition against using Muslim wet nurses; the punishment for violators of that law was to be sold into slavery. It is not possible to determine whether those prohibitions were completely or partially implemented in Muslim and Christian dominions. The reiteration of the majority of those laws suggests that they were not always applied and that they had been passed at moments of great tension between the faithful of the two religions or else between neighboring states, and by rulers who were zealots when it came to religious matters. In the House of Islam, Christians could bring lawsuits against Muslims in Islamic courts, but testimony from their coreligionists was not considered valid. This rule progressed in parallel with the Islamization of occupied regions.
