Khitan

Khitan is male circumcision as practised in Islam. Notably, it is not commanded in the Quran, which does not mention it; its standing rests instead on the practice (sunna) of the Prophet, on his being counted among those who followed the way of Abraham, and on long and near-universal custom across the Muslim world. The jurists of the different schools weigh it differently, ranging from an obligation to a strongly recommended act, and the age at which it is performed varies widely by region, from the days after birth to boyhood, often marked with celebration.

The tradition places it within the wider category of acts belonging to natural human disposition (fitra) and cleanliness. Because it rests on custom and prophetic precedent rather than an explicit scriptural command, its precise ruling has been a genuine subject of juristic discussion, even as the practice itself has remained one of the most consistently observed markers of Muslim identity.

Male circumcision predates Islam by many centuries and was already practiced among Arabs and other peoples of the ancient Near East before Muhammad, which is part of why the Quran itself never legislates it: Islamic tradition inherited an existing custom rather than introducing a new one, and shared Abrahamic narrative, in which the patriarch Ibrahim is circumcised as an adult in obedience to God, gives the practice a common reference point across Jewish and Islamic sources even though the two traditions came to treat its timing very differently.

Where Jewish law fixes circumcision precisely on the eighth day of life with few exceptions, Islamic practice sets no single required age at all, and the age at which boys are circumcised varies enormously by region and culture, from infancy in some communities to a public rite of passage performed on boys old enough to remember it in others, a variation classical jurisprudence has generally left to custom rather than attempting to standardize. This absence of Quranic legislation is also why the practice's legal status is graded differently across the schools, some treating it as strongly recommended and others as closer to obligatory, a genuine juristic difference rather than a dispute over whether the practice is legitimate at all. In recent decades the practice has also become part of a wider, largely secular debate over infant male circumcision generally, a modern controversy about consent and medical necessity that runs alongside, rather than within, the religious discussion.