Beams of Illumination From the Divine Revelation (juz' 'amma - the Last Section of the Qur'an)

Sura 2 : Surat Al Fil the Elephant

In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Most Merciful

This surah refers to the event that took place, as far as we know, in the year of the birth of the Prophet, salla-llihu alayhi wa alihi wa sallam. Although many people talked about it at the time, very few of the actual details of the event have come down to us. We know that people were very jealous of the residents of Mecca and the Quraysh, who, as guardians of the house of Sayyidna Ibrahim, alayhi-s-salam, that is, the House of God, held a position of great honor among the Arabs. One of their rivals was the Emperor of Abyssinia. Through his viceroy Abraha in the Yemen, he built what he believed was another Ka'bah, this time in San'a, to compete with the one in Mecca. This second ka'bah did not attract pilgrims in the numbers the Emperor had hoped for, and so he sent a huge army, headed by elephants, to de­stroy the Ka'bah in Mecca. He believed that San'a could thus become the most important center of pilgrimage in that part of the world.

1 Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with the possessors of the elephant?

What is of relevance here is the confrontation between apparent strength and power of great magnitude with its direct opposite. The lesson is that real power is not measurable by ordinary means. The destruction of the army which had been sent to destroy the Ka'bah was not a miracle but, rather it was a natural phenomenon which heralded the birth of the Prophet, salla-llahu 'alayhi wa alihi wa sallam, the shining forth of that great Light in the midst of darkness.

To understand the significance of the elephant we must realize that what weapons people possessed at that time were flimsy and scarce. In a land where warriors had, at most, a few thin spears and bent swords, the possession of an elephant meant that its possessor was regarded almost as an emperor.

2 Did He not cause their strategy to end in confusion?

Kayd means "an artful plot," or "scheme." Did Allah not make their plot go awry?

3 And send down flocks of flying creatures onto them,

Ababil means "flocks," and it does not necessar­ily only refer to birds but also to large, overwhelming numbers.

4 Pelting them with stones of baked clay.

Sijjil means "stones like lumps of dry clay." It is related to the verb sajala, which means "to record, write down," or "document." There are many interpretations of this ayah. We do not know what this phenomenon was, whether an actual storm brought a swarm of tiny creatures that inflicted this large army with sijjil, which penetrated their flesh, or whether a disease sud­denly came upon them (many illnesses such as measles and small pox were not identified in those days), perhaps brought by birds and in­sects. Despite the fact that this occurrence was widely known and dis­cussed, we still do not know the nature of the affliction, because at that time people's understanding of natural phenomenon was not as ours is now. We know only that this mighty army was suddenly, to­tally, and utterly devastated, just as it was approaching the Ka'bah.

5 So He made them as devoured straw.

The result of the attack was that the enormous army became like leftover stalks and leaves of grain or grass after having been beaten to a stubble and was razed to the ground. In some of the numerous descriptions, it is said that after this destruction the ground appeared as if a flat sheet made up of the thousands of men of the enemy army and their elephants had been laid down on it.