Medieval Christians fabricated animal tricks to parody Muhammad’s claimed revelation.

Evidence

There is one important group of stories that excluded Gabriel. These are all fantasies. They are stories that told of a dove whom Muhammad, or a wicked teacher of Muhammad, trained to eat a grain of corn from the Prophet’s ear, to simulate the Holy Ghost; or of a bull, or calf, or camel, similarly trained to come at his call, bearing the Book of the Law bound to its horns. These were prodigies which it was sometimes believed had been confirmed by further bogus miracles, by secreted milk and honey made at the appropriate moment to flow like fountains.®! The narrators cannot have given much thought to the difficulties of rigging such tricks up, but they did see that it was necessary to stress the folly and simplicity of the Arabs, who were deceived by such devices. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 200

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of a trained dove eating corn from Muhammad’s ear to fake the Holy Ghost is a strikingly absurd medieval polemic invention — good dinner-party trivia.
• STORYSTEM: A fiction seed: a medieval fabulist who leaks one of these forged miracle stories, and the difficulty of actually rigging the tricks — the logistics of a lie discovered by its own inventiveness.
• SHARE: Would delight someone into the history of anti-Islamic polemic or fabrication detection — the camel trained to carry a book on its horns.