1. The mistake about camels in the Koran is traditional and I probably borrowed it from Borges:
A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there ever were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist, or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Argentine Writer and Tradition (1951) (my emphasis)
Quoted from https://arabist.net/blog/2006/6/30/borges.html (10-29-2021
Borges is a writer, not a historian. Borges’ Gibbon is a “fiction”, which should not be mistaken for the historical Gibbon.
As the context makes clear,Borges uses the case of camels and the Koran as a resource domain for an analogy about the local color and the Argentine literature, an Argentina without gauchos is paralleled with a Koran without camels (certainly in relation with the Florida – Boedo antagonism)
2. Gibbon, Gagnier and the milk of the camel
Edward Gibbon never said that there was no camel in the Qur’an. Speaking about the life of the Arabs at the time of Mohammed, he praises the camel:
Alive or dead, almost every part of the camel is serviceable to man: her milk is plentiful and nutritious; the young and tender flesh has the taste of veal (13)
Footnote 13 […] Mahomet himself, who was fond of milk, prefers the cow and does not even mention the camel. But the diet of Mecca and Medina was already more luxurious (Gagnier, Vie de Mahomet, tom. iii, p. 404).
Edward Gibbon The History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, … Vol. IX, New York, Fred de Fau, 1907.
Speaking of Muhammad’s diet, Gagnier actually says,
« milk was the prophet’s most favorite element » (p. 401).
Later, he quotes Muhammad saying:
« Cow’s milk nourishes & sustains the body (…) It is the most commendable of all milks, & it surpasses by its good qualities the milk of Sheep & the milk of Goat, especially by its delicacy and unctuousness » (p. 404).
Jean Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet… [The life of Mahomet…] Amsterdam, Wetstein & Smith. 1748.
This is a hierachization of the milks, topped by goat’s miks, followed by sheep’s milk, followed down by cow’s milk, etc.
The fact that came’s milk is not mentionned is not silence, but a relevant omission, by application of relevance rule, as shown by the possibility to add an etc to capp-off Gagnier’s enumeration.
3 A misreading of Gibbon’s text? A tentative reconstruction
A quick reader goes over the trivial « accessory » (between brackets):
Mahomet himself, [who was fond of milk], prefers the cow and] does not even mention the camel
but on the “essential” beginning and end of the sentence:
Mahomet does not even mention the camel.
This could be seen as a case of omission of relevant circumstances (S. Accident), resulting in a misconstruction of the reference chain and of the topic of the passage.
Finally, since, basically, Muhammad is the Koran, the conclusion is that:
Gibbon says that the Koran does not mention the camel.
QED.