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The owl

البومة

'No contagion, no hama, no Safar': the Prophet ﷺ abolished the Arabs' omen in the owl, whose screech on a house they read as a call for blood — a creed that freed the birds from the curse of augury.

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Region
Global / Diaspora

Animals and mercy

The long-form text for this entry has not been written yet. The facts and connections below come from the museum's data.

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Mentioned in
Muwatta 2724

People and things also explored

Contagion (adwa)· Muwatta, Book of Miscellaneous (al-jami')· Abu Hurayra· Malik ibn Anas· Muwatta 2724· The birds of the elephant· Anam (livestock: camels, cattle and sheep, and their rulings)· The ant

Sources

  • Muwatta, recension of Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi (ed. Bashar Awwad Ma'ruf)
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islam.museum contributors. “The owl”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/concept/owl/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-11-09.

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Wing

Living

Practices, the Islamic year, festivals, food, dress and music by region. Related

Contagion (adwa)

Linguistically, adwa is a sickness passing from its owner to another; as a technical term it is the same idea. Most scholars hold that disease does not pass by its own nature but by God's act and decree, and they reconcile the hadith 'no contagion' with the hadith 'the diseased should not be brought to the healthy'. Umar and a group of early scholars deny contagion; another group affirms it, citing the hadith about a leper of the Thaqif delegation and the hadith 'flee from the leper'. Fear of contagion is not forbidden so long as it does not prevent an obligatory act; but entering a land stricken by plague is forbidden by the text.