The camel urine hadith: 5 things the report says

The strongest form of the objection is simple: the report exists, it is graded sound, and in it Muhammad (peace be upon him) directs people to drink camel urine. All of that is correct. Anas ibn Malik narrated that some men from Ukl or Uraynah, the narrators being unsure of the tribe, came to Medina and became ill because the climate did not suit them. The Prophet told them to go to a herd of camels and drink their milk and their urine. They did so and recovered.^[1]

The report appears several times in Sahih al-Bukhari, including in the Book of Ablutions and the Book of Medicine, and in Sahih Muslim in the book on oaths, those who wage war, retaliation and blood money.^[1] The placement matters, because the compilers filed it under purity, medicine and criminal law. None of them placed it under worship or under the duties of a Muslim. What the text records is a single instruction to a group of sick visitors on one occasion.

The objector will say that anything the Prophet prescribed is a model for Muslims. The jurists did not read it so. No school of law holds that drinking camel urine is obligatory or recommended, and it does not appear among the acts of worship or the sunna practices (sunna is the example of the Prophet) that scholars list for the believer. The report names a particular illness, a particular group of men and a particular remedy.

Later authors collected such reports under the heading of prophetic medicine (ṭibb), and scholars such as Ibn al-Qayyim treated much of it as the customary treatment of the Arabian setting, with some of it held to be revealed guidance.^[2] The distinction between revelation about religion and personal opinion about worldly matters has a firm basis. In Sahih Muslim, the Prophet is reported to have advised against a method of palm pollination, to have seen the crop suffer, and to have said that he was only a human being, that what he gave from God must be taken, and that the people knew their worldly affairs better.^[3] Scholars differ over how many medical reports belong on each side of that line. They do not differ over whether this one binds Muslims today.

A critic may press a further point: if urine is impure in Islamic law, the instruction seems to contradict the rules of ṭahāra (ritual purity). The answer is that the schools differ. The Malikis and the Hanbalis held that the urine of animals whose meat is lawful to eat is pure, and they took this report as evidence. The Hanafis and the Shafiis generally held it to be impure.^[4]

Those who held it impure had to explain the report. Some said that it was a special case for these men, and some said that medicinal use is allowed where there is need and no other remedy, a position found among Hanafi jurists as well.^[4] Al-Bukhari placed the report in the Book of Ablutions under a chapter on the urine of camels, sheep and other livestock, which suggests to many commentators that he did not regard it as a matter of defilement, though the heading is open to more than one reading.^[1] The evidence does not settle the legal dispute, and the schools never claimed that it did.

Critics usually quote the first half of the report and stop. The narration continues. After recovering, the men killed the herdsman who had cared for them, mutilated him according to several versions, drove off the camels and left Islam. The Prophet sent men after them, and they were captured and punished.^[1] The compilers placed it under the law of those who wage war precisely because the punishment, not the cure, is the legal subject of the narration.

Many jurists linked the case to the law of ḥirāba, armed robbery and spreading terror, in Quran 5:33–34, which names killing, crucifixion, cutting of hands and feet from opposite sides, or banishment, and exempts those who repent before capture.^[5] Scholars differ on how to read the punishment. Some say it was retaliation in kind for what the men did to the herdsman. Others say the verse was revealed about them, or that the verse replaced the harsher treatment. Later reports also record the Prophet forbidding mutilation (muthla).^[6] The details of the punishment remain disputed. The point on which the sources agree is that it answered murder and robbery.

A final objection is that some Muslims promote camel urine as a cure and that the report is their warrant. The World Health Organization advises people to avoid drinking raw camel milk and camel urine, because camels can carry infections, among them the MERS coronavirus.^[7] The agency makes that recommendation on the grounds of infection risk, whatever the religious background of the drinker.

Many contemporary Muslim scholars and doctors say that the report gives no reason for anyone to take it. They note that it is a single case of sick men who recovered, and that one such account cannot establish a general treatment, nor does it outweigh the duty to avoid harm that the sources place on every believer. A reader who finds claims of cures online should ask what evidence stands behind them. This article does not claim that such evidence exists, and it does not claim that the report has been tested by modern trials. The medical question belongs to physicians, and their current advice is caution.