Machine summary:
judge from the I published material, this literature is predominantly concerned with the I important formal side of education and contains comparatively little information on child psychology and the Muslim view of it.
A tradition ascribed to the Pro• phet-an attribution which, however, the Khatib al-Baghdadi who reports the tradition declares to· be very doubtful-deals with the youngest age: "Do not beat 'your children when they cry, for the crying of a child is, for four months, the confession that There is no God but God; for.
* * * When we now turn front this brief description of the general attitude toward the child -in Islam to the more specific approach to the subject which we find in some branches of intellectual activity, we encounter the rather unexpected phenomenon that the Muslim religious law and dogma has since its earliest times been concerned with making a distinction between children and adults.
" In Christianity, the problem of the salvation of children was connec• ted with that of child baptism.
51 The extremist Sbi'ah-incidentally, a group whose dogmatic history often caused them to overcome the traditional reluctance to accept child• ren as on a level with adults in the case of children of "Alid descent52 - also had its peculiar opinions on the subject according to Al-Ash'ari, Some of them maintained that infants suffered in this world and that their suffering was the result of a divine act which was the necessary consequence of their being created beings sensitive to pain.