Drinking urine?
The people of the Arabian Peninsula have been consuming the camel urine for a long time.
Urine has been used by the Bedouins as a shampoo and as a medication for centuries, so this is part of the Muslim tradition. It is said that the Prophet of Islam had once asked some of his sick followers to drink milk and camel’s urine “until their organs were healthy. ”
This authentic hadith is reported in several versions by Bukhari and Shaih Muslim:
According to “Anas ibn Malîk (may Allah be pleased with him), ‘Urayna’s people came to Madinah to find the Messenger of Allah, and as they had great stomach pain, Allah’s Messenger (sws) tells them :
“If it suits you, go and drink milk and urine from the camels of alms.”
By following his advice, they recovered themselves, but they killed the shepherds, returned to their faith, and seized the camels of the Messenger of Allah. Immediately informed, the Prophet sent in their footsteps men who rejoined them and brought them back. He then ordered them to cut off their hands and feet, to put out their eyes with a red-hot iron, and to leave them at “Al-Harra” where they perished (as talion, for these bandits had killed the shepherds in the same cruel way).
Number of the Hadith in the Sahih of Muslim (Arabic only: 3162) (French: 961)
In a Hadith reported by Al-Bukhari 7: 590:
“The prophet (SWS) commanded them to follow his camels and drink their milk and urine. That is what they did until they recovered from their health. “
Since the 7th century, the Yemenites have followed this advice. Statistics about the use of camel urine are scarce, but if you spend time in Yemen you will find people, especially in the countryside, who drink urine as a cure for almost anything unpleasant. Some use it as a remedy for hair loss.
A friend who lived in Yemen told me that, according to the local breeders with whom he spoke, the urine of virgin camels is very expensive and highly sought after for its delicate taste and its curative powers, and can cost up to The equivalent of £20 for a single litre!
Researchers in Muslim countries take the advice of their prophet seriously and have recently tried to lend a scientific basis to the claims that drinking urine cures diseases. In February 2013, a team from King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, claimed that they had extracted a substance called PMF701 from camel urine that could be used to treat cancer. Similar claims were made by the same researchers in 2009 when they said they had seen evidence that camel’s milk mixed with urine could fight eczema and psoriasis!
However, they have never been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to carry out further studies on patients, and there have been many scientists and doctors in the region who have publicly denounced the practice of sipping the camel’s urine. The professors of the University of Sana’a in the capital of Yemen had done everything to remind people that drinking urine is bad for the digestive system. Dr. Rida Al-Wakil, a professor at a medical university in Egypt, told the Alrai, an Arabic language newspaper in Kuwait, that the claims and advertisements for camel urine treatments for hepatitis were Misleading “and potentially dangerous.