The Mule (Al-Baghl — البغل): The Sterile Hybrid That Kings Rode and Nobody Could Replace

I have to admit, the mule surprised me. I went into this entry expecting a dull beast of burden, the punchline of a joke about stubbornness. What I found instead was an animal the medieval world could not stop arguing about: too useful to dismiss, too strange to classify, and trailed by stories that swing from battlefield miracles to a miller’s very bad day.

Half horse, half donkey, wholly in between

Al-Damiri starts with the basics, and the basics are already weird. The mule, he says, is well known — a compound of horse and donkey. From that mixed parentage it took the donkey’s toughness and the horse’s great build. Even its voice is a hybrid: its bray, the book says, is born from the horse’s neigh and the donkey’s bray mixed together. Every limb of it, if you measured, would land somewhere between horse and donkey. Its character too: it has neither the horse’s cleverness nor the donkey’s dullness. It sits exactly in the middle, and stays there.

Here is the detail that made me stop and reread: if the father is a donkey, the mule looks strikingly like a horse. If the father is a horse, it looks strikingly like a donkey. Nature, it seems, always hands the mule the other parent’s face. And the Arabs gave this in-between animal a whole shelf of nicknames — Abu al-Ashhaj, Abu al-Harun, Abu al-Saqr, Abu Quda’a, Abu Qamus, Abu Ka’b, Abu Mukhtar, Abu Mal’un — plus the nickname “ibn nahiq,” son of the brayer. An animal with that many names is an animal people thought about a lot.

The book adds, as the old writers loved to do, that the first man to breed mules was Qarun — the famously wealthy, famously doomed figure of the Quran. Take that as the book’s own claim, not mine.

The one rule everybody knew — and the birth that broke it

The mule is sterile. That was the one fact nobody disputed. “More barren than a mule” became a proverb, and “more barren than a she-mule” another. Ask a mule who its father is, the Arabs joked, and it answers: “The horse is my uncle” — the punchline for anyone muddled about where he comes from.

And then, in the same entry, the book calmly breaks its own rule. In the history of Ibn al-Batriq, under the events of the year 444 of the Hijra, a mule in Nablus gave birth inside a black stone chamber — to a white mule. “This is the strangest thing I have heard,” the historian wrote, and al-Damiri quotes him word for word. I love that. The medieval writers were not gullible; they knew exactly how impossible this was, and they wrote it down anyway, with the wonder intact.

There is an older version of the same idea, and it is stranger still. Ibn Asakir reports that mules used to reproduce in ancient times — until they proved the fastest of all beasts at hauling firewood for the fire of Ibrahim. Ibrahim prayed against them, the report says, and GOD cut off their progeny. Frame that as the historical belief it is, but notice what it reveals: the mule’s sterility was so famous that people invented a sacred explanation for it.

The mount of kings, and the guide that never got lost

For all the jokes about its mixed blood and bad temper — the book says the mule is described as ill-tempered and changeable precisely because of its mixed composition — the mule had one gift nobody mocked. Walk it down a road once, and it would guide you down it ever after, unerring. It was, the book says, the mount of kings on their journeys and the ride of penniless wanderers getting their errands done, bearing heavy loads and enduring long marches with a patience nobody else could match.

Amr ibn al-As, conqueror of Egypt, was once seen riding a mule whose muzzle had gone grey with age. Someone asked him — you, with the finest mounts in Egypt, riding this? His answer is worth keeping: he never tired of his mount while it carried his leg, of his wife while she treated him well, or of his friend while he kept his secret. Boredom, he said, is one of the lies of character. An old mule, and a small lesson in loyalty.

The miller’s mules, and the guess that was right

My favourite story in the entry is short and darkly funny. A miller in Baghdad had two mules. He named one Abu Bakr and the other Umar. One day one of them kicked him — and killed him. When the news reached Abu Hanifa, he said: look at which one kicked him; it will be the one he named Umar. They looked. It was.

I am not going to pretend I know what to do with that story. It is the kind of tale medieval books loved: a joke, a warning about naming animals after revered men, and a famous jurist’s cold guess, all in five lines. It stuck in my head longer than the battlefield stories did.

Duldul, the grey mule at Hunayn

But the entry’s heart belongs to Duldul, the grey mule of the Prophet. At Hunayn, when the Muslim ranks broke, the Prophet stood his ground on Duldul and called for a handful of dust. The mule, the book says, pressed her belly flat to the earth so he could reach the gravel, then rose again as he flung it in the enemy’s faces crying, “May faces be disfigured!” — and the enemy fled. One version says GOD made the mule understand his words; she lowered herself until her belly nearly touched the ground.

Duldul lived on after him. Her teeth fell out with age, and barley had to be mashed for her, until she died at al-Baqi in the time of Mu’awiya. The scholars even argued over whether Duldul was male or female — Ibn al-Salah’s circle said female; the hadith scholars, the book notes, agreed she was male. A mule so famous that her sex became a scholarly debate.

There is one more Duldul-adjacent tale I cannot leave out. Khuzayma ibn Aws heard a prophecy describing a woman of al-Hira, al-Shayma bint Nufayl, arriving on a grey mule wrapped in a black veil — and claimed her in advance. When the Muslims entered al-Hira, there she was, exactly as described, grey mule and black veil both. He sold her to her brother for a thousand dirhams. When people told him he could have asked a hundred thousand, he answered that he did not reckon any sum of money greater than a thousand. A man who thought a thousand dirhams was the ceiling of wealth, standing next to a prophecy fulfilled to the letter.

One honest note about this entry: like the Buraq entry before it, the mule’s story keeps swelling into long biographies — Zayn al-Abidin, Abu Hanifa, Abu Yusuf, Abu Dulama — pages of scholars and judges who happened to ride mules. I have kept the mule’s own story here and left the biographies where they belong, in the book.

The book’s legal verdict is blunt: eating the mule born of a domestic donkey and a horse is forbidden, since it mixes the lawful and the unlawful and the unlawful side wins — though a wild-donkey cross is lawful, and a starving people with nothing but a mule were excused by necessity. And its book of wonders adds a homely touch, recorded as historical belief only: fumigate a house with a male mule’s hoof, and mice and vermin flee it. The kings’ mount, the paupers’ ride, the sterile beast that once gave birth — the mule earned every one of its nicknames.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is al-baghl, the mule, in Hayat al-Hayawan?

   Al-baghl is the mule, a hybrid of horse and donkey. The book says it combines the donkey’s toughness with the horse’s bulk, has a voice blending a neigh and a bray, and resembles whichever parent was not its father. It was famed as a patient load-bearer and an unerring guide on roads it had travelled once.

2. Are mules really sterile?

   The book treats mule sterility as settled fact — “more barren than a mule” was a proverb — but records one famous exception: a mule in Nablus in the year 444 AH that gave birth to a white mule inside a black stone chamber, which the historian called the strangest thing he had heard.

3. Who was Duldul?

   Duldul was the Prophet’s grey mule, famous at the Battle of Hunayn, where she pressed her belly to the ground so he could scoop dust to throw at the enemy. She outlived him, lost her teeth with age, was fed mashed barley, and died at al-Baqi in Mu’awiya’s time.