Yaʽfūr

Ya`fūr (sometimes encountered as Ya'foor or Ya'four, etc., and named by some sources as `Ufayr) was a donkey used as a mount by the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Described in books written centuries after Muhammad's life, the animal has been portrayed with remarkable characteristics in Shi'ite tradition. In 2012, an international furor over the film trailer for Innocence of Muslims focused in part on differences in the perception of these accounts, which are based on hadith which, for critics, exemplify the absurdity of Islam, but for believers may be viewed as parables, but apocryphal and of no great importance to their faith.

Original sources

Ya'fur is described by Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari as one of several gifts from al-Muqawqis, brought by Hātib b. Abi Balta'ah with the slave women Maria al-Qibtiyya and her sister Sīrīn, a eunuch, the female mule Duldul (described as the "first mule in Islam"), and goods. According to the account, Ya'fur died shortly after the Farewell Pilgrimage.

A more extraordinary story by Ibn Kathir in Al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya, written in the fourteenth century, has been extensively referenced by critics such as Zakaria Botros, on which the Innocence of Muslims video is based. The story describes a conversation between Muhammad and Ya'fur in which the donkey said that sixty generations of its forebears had been ridden only by prophets; after Muhammad's death the donkey commits suicide by jumping in a well to avoid being ridden by anyone else.