[3][2] Although forced conversion is not widely recognized under Islamic laws, historian and Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein believes that a forced conversion of orphans could have been justified by the revelation attributed to Muhammad that states: "Every person is born to the natural religion [Islam], and only his parents make a Jew or a Christian out of him.
A translation of the poem runs thus: "Thousands of orphaned souls, both boys and girls, were wrested from the arms of their parents, grandfather and grandmother, by force by the nations all the days of the many kings of Yemen.
[2] Tudor Parfitt compares the Orphans' Decree to "draconian measures introducing the forced conscription of Jewish children into the Czarist's army" in Russia.
[4] Concerning the reintroduction of the Orphans' Decree in Yemen in 1921, after the end of Ottoman rule, Parfitt says that "in the first ten years" it "was implemented with great rigour.
The Jewish community offered to pay for the children's release to their family, but Islamic law prohibits accepting money to avert such a conversion.
[2] In the first-half of the twentieth-century, the Chief Rabbi of Yemen, Yihya Yitzhak Halevi, worked tirelessly to save Jewish orphans from falling into the hands of Muslims.