Al-Mi'raj

Did You Know?

• The creature is also called ʿarāj or baqrāj in some accounts.
• An 18th-century Turkish translation of Qazwini at the Walters Art Museum illustrates the dragon and horned hare.

Qazwini's account

Al-Mi'raj is described in Qazwini's Marvels of Things Created as a yellow hare with a single black horn, living on Jazīrat al-Tinnīn in the Indian Ocean. All wild beasts fled at the sight of it, a trait shared with the karkadann. The islanders gave the creature to Iskandar after he killed a dragon that had been eating livestock. In the Sarre manuscript, the hare is drawn faithfully to the text, captioned 'Dragon of Dragon Island and the Miraculous Hare'. However, in the Berlin copy it appears as a hybrid animal resembling a fierce hound. The Sarre manuscript and other copies do not name the horned hare; Michel Wiedemann believed the name was added by later copyists. The oldest copy, the Munich manuscript, shows the dragon devouring sulfur-filled bulls.

Idrisi's account

In a recension of Idrisi's Nuzhat al-Mushtaq, the horned hare is called ʿarāj, and the dragon-inhabited isle is named Mustashiayn in Western Africa. Iskandar, also called Dhu'l-Qarnayn, defeats the dragon by stuffing sacrificial oxen with active substances that ignite fire inside the monster. A modern edition of Idrisi gives the name baqrāj for the horned hare, describing it as hare-like with a shiny gold coat and a single black horn, causing wild animals and birds to flee. In this account, Iskandar traded aloeswood for the baqrāj.

Dragon-slaying variations

Iskandar's dragon-slaying uses decoy oxen filled with lethal materials. In Qazwini's cosmology, the ingredients included coniferous resin, sulfur, quicklime, arsenic, and iron hooks, or just sulfur and iron hooks. The dragon-slaying Iskandar is identified with a shah of the Persian Shahnāma, where five oxen filled with poison and oil are used. In Ahmedî's Iskendername, İskender attaches a thousand poisoned hooks to his ox-driven chariot and assaults the dragon, a tactic paralleled in the Shahnāma for the king Isfandiyar.

Pop culture references

Al-Mi'raj appears in Dungeons & Dragons as part of the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio. In the Dragon Quest series, it is a low-level monster with a sleep attack, renamed 'Spiked Hare' in U.S. localizations but preserved in the Game Boy Color version. In the anime Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, white two-legged rabbits are identified as al-mi'raj. The animated short 'Red' features an al-mi'raj that can grow monstrous.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game includes Al-Lumi'raj and Salamangreat Almiraj. In Rage of Bahamut and Shadowverse, a humanoid rabbit called Moon Al-Mir'aj appears. A Donald Duck story involves a fake Mi'Raj. In Brave Frontier, Al-mi'raj is a light-element rabbit.

In I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years, a musician bunny girl is from the Al-Mi'raj race. Re:Zero season 2 shows multiple al-mi'raj on a snowy plain. In KonoSuba, Al-Mir'Aj are common hostile monsters. In the series Industry, an Egyptian sovereign wealth fund named Al-Miraj takes over a bank.