A maid puts a baby in the refrigerator to make him stop crying, which he does upon feeling the cold. Another one pricks a child's head with pins when he shouts, to keep him silent and to put him to sleep for a long time. When she knows that her employer does not want her and that he plans to send fire her, she puts his child in the washing machine. The child dies and she flees to another country. A third one puts rubbish in the food to make the family stop asking her to cook. More calamitous still is the maid who puts crushed glass in the food to take revenge on her employer.
A woman discovered that her maid brought books of magic which contain polytheistic spells to harm the family. There is more: a servant becomes illicitly pregnant with a young man in the family, and threatens to disgrace them if they do not immediately pay her whatever she wants. What adds fuel to the fire is that the children of her employer imitate the maid's polytheistic worship; moreover, she also brings pornographic movies and watches them with the children.
In this way, the maid turns into a time bomb that may explode at any time, and the first victims will be the young children. However, the danger does not stop there; rather, it extends to include all the members of the family whether they are young men or women, or husbands or wives.
A Saudi study finds that 59% of babysitters and maids prefer having illegal sexual relations before marriage; 69% of maids are no more than 20 years of age and all of them are from classes that are dominated by poverty, ignorance and backwardness; 75 % of them are non-Muslims, most of them do not adopt divinely-revealed religions (i.e. originally before man’s distortion to them); and 6% of non-Muslim maids perform their religious rituals in front of the children.
The study ascribes the presence of maids in Gulf societies to many reasons, some of which are: the society's luxurious lifestyle, the expansion and numerous fields of work for the father of the family, the woman's work outside the house, negligence of the household duties by some mothers, the husbands' desire to relieve their wives, the large number of family members, and, finally, imitating others and love of social appearance and boasting about how many servants one has.
The study also asserted that these maids negatively affect the family and the child because the child spends a longer time with the maid than that which he spends with the mother. For this reason, he imitates her poor style of speaking and uses symbols instead of uttering words. Such things affect his linguistic abilities. What is more dangerous is that maids transmit to them their customs and traditions and the culture of their own societies, which differ from Islamic culture - and this affects the language, knowledge and psychology of the children. It also leads to the spread of wrongdoings and deviation in many children due to the bad upbringing that they receive, as well as the lack of supervision. This spreads corrupt beliefs and deviant ideas and disseminates vice and incorrect concepts.
Different Cultures and Customs
Dr. Muhammad An-Niklaawi, professor of sociology at Cairo University, confirms that the foreign (non-Muslim) maid transmits a certain culture and different upbringing to the child. She belongs to people who neither realize ‘wrongdoing’ nor adhere to any particular customs. Also, she knows nothing about our Islamic customs in which the child is brought up in accordance with the morals of the Quran, which includes all the factors of moral disciplining. Moreover, such maids and governesses weaken the child's language (mother tongue) and affect his ethos. Moreover, they instigate isolation between fathers and mothers, and this causes the child to be isolated from the family and detaches the Muslim home from its origins.
Dr. An-Niklaawi warns against these dangers saying,
We have to face and rectify this serious error, for if we allow this crisis to spread and worsen in our Islamic societies, we would be bringing up generations which speak a foreign tongue (according to that of the maid), lack the features of their religion and absorb from foreign (non-Muslim) maids strange qualities and customs which contribute in their desire to distance themselves from religion altogether. If all of these negative aspects exist, then nothing is left for us to bring up our children except the loss of the coming generations which should be carrying the message of the Ummah (Muslim nation) including the religious, political, cultural, and social responsibilities.
Too Many Negative Aspects
In the same context, Dr. Muhammad Yoosuf Ash-Shaykh, a professor at the Faculty of Education, Al-Azhar University, says that the presence of the maid (or a baby-sitter) in the house has no positive aspects at all. On the contrary, it has many negative aspects. The most serious of these is the great imbalance that it causes in the upbringing of the child. She transmits the culture of her own environment and implants the culture, customs, traditions, and style of thinking of her society. It is also a great disaster if she belongs to a different religion (i.e. a non-Muslim). This automatically causes the child to be brought up in accordance with the principles of another religion. The maid (or baby-sitter) sits with the child, plays with him and speaks with him more than his mother does. Consequently, the child is easily influenced by her because he naturally imitates the adults who are more often with him. He spontaneously imitates them because he cannot differentiate between what is right and wrong. No matter how hard the mother tries to supervise the maid, she will fail because it is not possible to watch her all the time. Therefore, it is better for the mother - instead of wasting her time watching the maid - to invest her time in bringing up her children and to do without the maid.
In case of a baby-sitter, no such monitoring exists to start with, which makes the matter even more serious and fatal.
Dr. Ash-Shaykh asserts that the absence of the mother's role in a child’s upbringing weakens the natural relationship between her and her child; hence, he will be deprived of the compassion and pity which he expects from his mother who is supposed to feel and understand him without the need to speak. No one should share this responsibility with her except the father who has a right to this. The presence of the maid is unacceptable in the child’s upbringing.
Furthermore, the presence of a maid is also deplorable because she is exposed to the secrets of the house and can thus easily reveal them.