[smifatv]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15432846

"Police believe that on 17 December 1998, there had been a terrible mix-up at the local maternity hospital. Two babies had been given the wrong name tags - and the wrong parents.

"At first I thought it was a joke," recalls Yulia. "Then I couldn't stop crying. My whole world had turned upside down. I kept worrying what Irina would say. And I kept thinking about my real daughter. Maybe she'd been abandoned. Put in an orphanage. Or perhaps she was begging on the streets."

Desperate to find her, Yulia went to the police and they launched a search for her biological daughter. Within weeks they had found her.

...in a village half an hour's drive from Yulia Belyaeva's flat, lives 12-year-old Anya Iskanderova. In a meadow opposite her house, she shows me her favourite cow April. Anya is the girl Yulia had given birth to. She is the spitting image of her biological mother.

In the house is Naimat Iskanderov - the man Anya thought was her father. Naimat is from Tajikistan. He had married a Russian woman, but they had divorced. It was Naimat who brought up Anya and his other children as devout Muslims. When police told him about the mistake at the maternity hospital and that Anya was not his daughter, to begin with he refused to believe it.


...."It is difficult," concedes Naimat. "One family is Christian, the other is Muslim. We have different traditions. What I fear most is that the daughter I've raised will start going drinking in bars, that she will stop praying and working. I'm worried she will lose her religion."
"


"For now the two girls say they do not want to swap parents. They are just glad to have found each other.

"To begin with we were a bit shy," Irina tells me, "but now we've become the best of friends."

"What I'd like," says Anya, "is for all of us to live in one big house.""


Hmmm.... I wonder what the Islamic ruling about this is? Are they technically sisters now? If the sibling are different gender, would they be mahrams? Non-mahrams? More complicatedly, being of different religions.