9بِأَيِّ ذَنبٍ قُتِلَتMuhammad Asadfor what crime she had been slain,1The barbaric custom of burying female infants alive seems to have been fairly widespread in pre-Islamic Arabia, although perhaps not to the extent as has been commonly assumed. The motives were twofold: the fear that an increase of female offspring would result in economic burdens, as well as fear of the humiliation frequently caused by girls being captured by a hostile tribe and subsequently preferring their captors to their parents and brothers. Before Islam, one of the foremost opponents of this custom was Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, a cousin of Umar ibn al-Khattab and spiritually a precursor of Muhammad (cf. Bukhari, Fada'il Ashab an-Nabi on the authority of Abd Allah ibn Umar); he died shortly before Muhammad's call to prophethood (Fath al-Bari VII, 112). Another man, Sa'sa'ah ibn Najiyah at-Tamimi - grandfather of the poet Farazdaq - achieved equal fame as a saviour of infants thus condemned to death; he later embraced Islam. Ibn Khallikan (II, 197) mentions that Sa'sa'ah saved about thirty girls by paying ransom to their parents.