Al-Afal: The Young Camels Whose Entry Drowned in a Hundred Pages of Sermons 🐫

Every so often, Hayat al-Hayawan hands you an entry that is barely a footprint in the sand. The afal young camels get exactly that: a single sentence, and then — nothing. Where other animals sprawl across pages of poetry and remedies, the afal appear, are defined, and vanish. Then the printed page does something stranger still: it buries them under a hundred pages of sermons that have nothing to do with camels at all.

What the Afal Young Camels Actually Are

Here is the whole entry, the way al-Damiri wrote it. The afal and the afa'il are the young of camels — specifically, the calves of young she-camels, the banat al-mikhad (بنات المخاض), and the like. One male calf is an afil (أفيل); the female is an afila (أفيلة). Then: “its mention will come later” — a cross-reference, a promise that the word will turn up again under some other heading. A definition, a parentage, the word forms, and a promise. That's the entire entry.

A Language That Counts Camel Birthdays

What I keep coming back to is the precision inside that one line. The afal aren't just “baby camels” — they're the calves of young mothers. The book bothers to say which dams they belong to, and it gives the masculine and the feminine forms separately, as if the reader might need both one day. You can feel the lexicographer at work here: al-Damiri filing a word the way a jeweler sets a small stone — no extra metal, just the setting.

The Hundred Pages That Swallowed the Entry

Then the strange part. In the edition I read, the line after “its mention will come later” launches into page after page of unrelated material: moral counsels (“if you want to be the strongest of people, put your trust in GOD…”), long poems, the story of Nizar ibn Ma'ad's sons tracking a lost camel by its footprints, biographies of caliphs — more than a hundred pages. None of it is al-Damiri's zoology. It's the kind of material that gets copied into old manuscripts' margins and eventually swallows the text whole.

I read through all of it waiting for the entry to resume. It never does. The next real animal entry — the goose — begins on page 70, fresh as if nothing had happened.

Why a One-Sentence Entry Still Matters

There's something honest about it. Al-Damiri had a word to define, so he defined it — no padding, no borrowed story, no remedy invented to fill space. In a book with ten-page digressions, the afal get four facts and a cross-reference, and somehow that feels like respect. The desert doesn't explain itself either. It just leaves the footprint, and moves on.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What does “afal” mean in Arabic?

   In classical Arabic, al-afal (الأفال) and al-afa'il (الأفائل) mean the young of camels — the calves. Al-Damiri specifies that they are the calves of young she-camels, the banat al-mikhad. The singular for a male calf is afil; the female form is afila. It is a vocabulary entry rather than a species: a word for a stage of life.

2. Why is the afal entry so short?

   Because there was nothing more the lexicographers had recorded about the word. Al-Damiri's book is half bestiary and half dictionary, and this entry is pure dictionary: a definition, the parentage, the word forms, and a note that the word will be mentioned again later. He wrote down what the sources gave him and stopped — which is exactly what a careful scholar should do.

3. What happened to the rest of the entry?

   In the printed edition I worked from, the entry is cut off mid-promise by a huge block of unrelated material — sermons, poems, and caliph biographies stretching over a hundred pages — before the next animal entry, the goose, begins. Whether the original manuscript said more about the afal is something I cannot verify from this edition, so I report only what the page actually shows.