L'interesse del fanciullo nella prospettiva del diritto musulmano e dei paesi islamici

The concept of 'best interest of the child' is a recent modern one and, as such, cannot be applied to a legal system developed centuries ago. Nonetheless, it is possible to find in the Islamic law a number of institutions that can be understood as instruments that protect and take care of the child in his/her best interest, such as the rules on breastfeeding, on aknowledgment of filiation (iqrar), on custody (hadana). In modern era, laws and jurisprudence of Islamic countries use the phrase maslaha al-tifl or maslaha al-mahdun (interest of the child) to focus on the need of choosing, among different solutions, the one that better protects the legal status of the child; at the same time, some principles of the Islamic law still hinder the recourse to institution like adoption which could offer better protection to orphans than those provided for by islamic law.