How Can Radhaʿah Be Reconstructed Through Maqasid for Lactation Justice Among Muslim Working Mothers?

Abstract

This study aims to reconstruct radhaʿah as a maqāṣid-based framework of lactation justice for Muslim working mothers without altering its settled doctrinal consequences. It combines normative Islamic legal analysis of Qurʾanic verses, hadith, classical fiqh, and maqāṣid scholarship with an integrative review of workplace lactation and care literature. Four targeted Scopus searches yielded 1,051 unique records after deduplication. Appraisal retained 54 journal articles; seven additional works identified through backward citation tracing and purposive supplementation brought the contemporary corpus to 61 articles. The analysis shows that radhaʿah scholarship treats the establishment and documentation of milk kinship in considerable detail, whereas workplace studies identify recurrent vulnerabilities involving time, privacy, workload, usable facilities, organizational culture, and employment protection. Islamic family law also recognizes a distributive logic through paternal maintenance, prevention of harm, mutual consultation, and ujrah al-radhāʿah, but these obligations are rarely connected to the responsibilities of workplaces and public institutions. The study concludes that the protective reasoning of radhaʿah can extend to the conditions of lactation without altering the established rules of milk kinship. Its contribution is a maqāṣid-based framework of lactation justice that joins milk-kinship certainty with child and maternal protection, bodily dignity, economic security, and differentiated institutional responsibility. This framework clarifies that lactation justice is not a departure from classical doctrine, but a contextual extension of its protective objectives, requiring coordinated support from families, employers, and public institutions while preserving doctrinal certainty concerning milk kinship and its legal effects clearly.