Al-Fil and Quraysh

The story starts in Yemen, not in Makkah. In the sixth century the south of Arabia was ruled from across the sea by the Christian king of Abyssinia, today's Ethiopia. His governor in Yemen was Abrahah, a commander who had fought his way to the post.

Abrahah had seen something that bothered him. The Arabs of his own province travelled north every year to a plain stone building in Makkah: the Ka'bah, which they honoured as the house of Abraham. He wanted those pilgrims. So he built a church in San'a' so tall, the Arabs said, that your cap fell off when you looked up at it. Then he announced that the pilgrimage would come to him from now on.

The Arabs did not come. In the telling Ibn Kathir and Ma'ariful Qur'an give first, one of them did worse: he slipped into the church at night and fouled it. Abrahah swore to pull the Ka'bah down stone by stone. He marched north with an army and a huge war elephant sent by his king. The reports name the elephant Mahmud, and some add eight or twelve more.

Arabs dated events from that year, the Year of the Elephant, traditionally the year of the Prophet's ﷺ birth, around 570. Many modern historians date Abrahah's campaign somewhat earlier. Years later the Qur'an told the story in five short lines. The first is a question: have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the people of the elephant?

The march on Makkah began as a contest over where Arabia would go on pilgrimage.

Abrahah camped at al-Mughammas, just outside Makkah, and his raiders drove off the town's herds. Among them were about two hundred camels belonging to 'Abd al-Muttalib, the leading man of Quraysh, the tribe that looked after the Ka'bah. He was also the grandfather of Muhammad ﷺ.

Abrahah sent word that he would not fight the people of Makkah unless they stood in the way of his destroying the building. 'Abd al-Muttalib's answer, as Ibn Ishaq reports it, was blunt: we do not want to fight him, and we could not if we tried. Then he went to the camp himself.

Abrahah was impressed by the look of him. He came down from his seat and sat beside him on the carpet. Through an interpreter he asked what his guest wanted. My two hundred camels, said 'Abd al-Muttalib. Abrahah was let down. I have come to destroy the house your religion rests on, he said, and you talk to me about camels? The reply is the best-known line in the story: I am the lord of the camels. The House has its own Lord, who will defend it.

He got his camels back. He told the people of Makkah to go up into the hills, held the ring on the door of the Ka'bah and prayed, then followed them up. Nobody was left to defend the House. The second line of al-Fil asks what became of Abrahah's plan: did He not make it go wrong?

Quraysh did not save the Ka'bah. They stepped aside and left it to its Lord.

In the morning the army formed up and the great elephant was pointed at Makkah. It knelt. In the telling both Ibn Kathir and Ma'ariful Qur'an give, the captured guide Nufayl had taken it by the ear, told it to kneel and go back because this was Allah's sacred city, and then run for the hills. The soldiers beat it and it would not rise. Turned towards Yemen, it got up and walked briskly. Towards Syria, the same. Turned back to Makkah, it knelt again.

Then, the surah says, Allah sent birds against them in flocks, pelting them with stones of baked clay. The reports say the birds came from the direction of the sea, each carrying three small stones, the size of a lentil or a chickpea: one in the beak and one in each claw.

The army broke and ran, calling for Nufayl to show them the road home. Not everyone was hit, and not everyone who was hit died on the spot. Abrahah was carried back towards San'a', wasting away, and died: in San'a' itself, says Ibn Ishaq, or on the road in the land of Khath'am, says 'Ata' ibn Yasar.

The surah has one image for all of it: He left them like eaten straw. Early commentators explain it as the husks and leaves of a crop after cattle have been at it. One of them, Ibn Zayd, took it to the end: what the cattle then leave behind as dung. Quraysh watched from the hills.

In al-Fil's telling, an army with an elephant was beaten by birds and clay.

Here is what that morning did for Quraysh, who had not fought. Word went round Arabia that Allah had destroyed an army for the sake of their House. Al-Qurtubi, quoted in Ma'ariful Qur'an, says the Arabs concluded that Quraysh were Allah's own people. Other caravans feared robbers. Theirs went through untouched.

And they needed caravans. Makkah sits in a dry valley where no crops grow. Quraysh, the Prophet's ﷺ tribe, lived by trade: a winter caravan to Yemen and a summer caravan to Syria. Because they guarded the Ka'bah, other tribes let their caravans pass safely.

Then a grandson of 'Abd al-Muttalib began to say that the Lord of that House was the only one to be worshipped, and the leaders of Quraysh, who kept idols, refused him. Surah Quraysh is four lines spoken into that quarrel. It names what they have grown used to, the two journeys. Then it turns this into a reminder: let them worship the Lord of this House, who fed them against hunger and made them safe from fear.

Ibn Ishaq notes that the Prophet ﷺ used to recount exactly this to Quraysh, the turning back of the Abyssinians, among Allah's favours to them. Some early copies of the Qur'an are reported to have joined this surah to al-Fil without a break.

The surah presents safety and food as gifts calling for worship.