Miracles with Animals: The Complaining and Prostrating Camels

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The second category is miracles involving animals. At Khaybar, when a Jewish woman poisoned the shank of a lamb, having asked which cut he loved best and been told the shoulder, the tenderest part, the Prophet ﷺ put it in his mouth and spat it out at once, saying the meat itself had informed him it was poisoned; one Companion who had swallowed his portion later died of it, and the woman confessed.

❧The camel that complained

Abū Dāwūd narrates that ʿAbdullāh ibn Jaʿfar, as a boy riding behind the Prophet ﷺ, saw them enter a garden of the Anṣār where a camel stood. Seeing the Prophet ﷺ, it came moaning, tears running from its eyes. He ﷺ called for its owner, a young Anṣārī, and said, "Do you not fear Allāh regarding this beast that cannot speak? It has complained to me that you starve it and overwork it and beat it." Who else, he taught, will hear such a complaint, if not the رَحْمَة لِلْعَالَمِين (mercy to the worlds)?

❧The maddened camel that prostrated

In Musnad Aḥmad, a group of Anṣār came about a camel gone berserk, penned up and attacking all who neared it. The Prophet ﷺ entered its pen alone; they feared for him, but he said no harm would come. As he approached, the narrator says the camel came before him and lowered its head to the ground as if in prostration. He ﷺ took its rein and led it back, and it was calm thereafter. The people said, "Yā RasūlAllāh, this animal that cannot even speak prostrated to you, are we not more deserving to prostrate to you?" He answered, فَلَا تَفْعَلُوا, "Do not do so; it is not permitted for any human to prostrate to another."

❧The camel that fled to be spared

In Musnad Aḥmad and Muṣannaf Ibn Abī Shaybah, a camel once ran into the masjid, put its head in the Prophet's ﷺ lap, and cried. He ﷺ said it had a شَأْن, a story to tell, and sent them to find its owners. The owners said they had worked it, then used it only to haul water, and had agreed the night before to slaughter it and share out its meat. So he ﷺ said, "Then sell it to me, or gift it to me, do not kill it," and they gave it to him: mercy shown to one animal that did not wish to die. And the famous case of Surāqah ibn Mālik belongs here too, his horse stopped dead each time it saw the Prophet ﷺ, throwing him three times, until he knew this was beyond him.