Defeat of Abraha (Year of the Elephant)

The destruction of the army of the elephant is the only event of pre-Islamic Arabian history which Allah Himself enshrined in a chapter of the Qur'an, and the Seerah tradition has therefore preserved its every movement with a care reserved for few stories of the age. The road to that destruction began in Yemen, which in the sixth century of the Christian era had fallen under the rule of Abyssinia after the tragedy of Dhu Nuwas, the Himyarite king who had persecuted the Christians of Najran, driving the plea of the oppressed across the sea to Caesar and thence to the Negus of Abyssinia. The Negus dispatched an army of seventy thousand under a general named Aryat, accompanied by another commander named Abraha, and the Abyssinians swept over Yemen and extinguished the Himyarite throne. For some years Aryat ruled; then Abraha challenged him, and the Abyssinian host split in two. The two commanders agreed to settle the matter in single combat rather than bleed their people, and in that duel the tall and handsome Aryat struck at Abraha's head, but the javelin slit his eyebrow, eye, nose, and lip, leaving the short, stocky, and devoutly Christian Abraha with the split face from which he took his epithet, al-Ashram; the slave Atwada, guarding Abraha's rear, then killed Aryat, and the whole host united under Abraha, who pacified the furious Negus by shaving his own head and sending him a bag of Yemeni soil to tread underfoot in fulfilment of his oath.

Secure in his power, Abraha conceived the ambition which the Qur'an would answer. He built in Sanaa a cathedral called al-Qullays, the like of which, Ibn Ishaq relates, had never been seen on earth before: marble and splendid furnishings carried from the derelict palace of the Queen of Sheba, crosses of gold and silver, pulpits of ivory and ebony, a vastness and height that stunned the Arabs. Al-Suhayli adds that Abraha humiliated the people of Yemen in its building, amputating the hand of any labourer who arrived after dawn. He wrote to the Negus: I have built you a church the like of which was never built for any king before you, and I shall not cease striving until I divert to it the pilgrimage of the Arabs. The Arabs heard of this intention and their anger blazed from the Hijaz to Najd, for whatever idols their tribes venerated, the Kaaba was the House of their father Ibrahim, the sanctuary of the sacred months, the axis of their pride. Finally a man of Kinanah, a tribe akin to Quraysh, travelled to Sanaa for the deliberate purpose of defiling the church, and did so one night and returned safely to his people, telling Abraha, when the deed was discovered, in every way that the al-Qullays was unworthy of the Arabs' pilgrimage.

Abraha's rage became a vow: he would go to the Kaaba and destroy it. He ordered his Abyssinian troops to equip themselves, and set forth at the head of a great army with an elephant in its van, and the Arabs along the entire route trembled, for they considered it their duty before God to fight for the sacred House. The reports preserve the names of those who tried. Dhu Nafar, a nobleman of Yemen, summoned his people and whoever would stand with him; they fought and were crushed, and Dhu Nafar was taken prisoner and spared for his usefulness. In the lands of Khatham, Nufayl ibn Habib al-Khathami arrayed his own tribe together with the allied tribes of Shahran and Nahis; Abraha defeated him too and took him bound, and Nufayl bought his life by offering to guide the army through Arab territory, so that the very men who resisted the invader were made, by force, to steer him toward the House of Allah. At Taif the men of Thaqif came out in fear that their temple of al-Lat would be mistaken for the Kaaba; they hastened to assure Abraha that he had not yet reached his goal and sent with him a guide named Abu Righal, who died on the road at a place called al-Mughammis, two miles from Makkah, where the Arabs long continued to stone his grave. Ibn Kathir adds the tradition that when the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, passed a grave of a man of the same name among the people, he told his companions that the dead man of Thamud who had sought sanctuary was buried with two branches of gold, and that when the grave was opened they were found, a sign that the Arabs themselves connected the stoning of Abu Righal's grave with the guilt of guiding destroyers toward holy ground.

At al-Mughammis Abraha halted and sent forward a detachment of cavalry under al-Aswad ibn Maqsud, which swept through the outskirts of Makkah seizing whatever it could, including two hundred camels belonging to Abdul-Muttalib ibn Hashim, who was at that time the leader and elder of Quraysh. Quraysh, Kinanah, and Hudhayl, and all who held the Kaaba holy, held a council of war and abandoned the idea of resistance when they saw that they had no power to match the host arrayed against them. Abraha then sent Hunata the Himyarite into Makkah with a message for its chief: I have not come to make war upon you, but only to destroy the building; if you do not defend it, there is no need for your blood. Lings adds the detail that there had been no official chief of Quraysh since the privileges of the city had been divided between the houses of Abd ad-Dar and Abd Manaf, but that the messenger was directed to the house of Abdul-Muttalib, whom most people regarded as in fact, if not by title, the leading man of Makkah.

What followed is among the most celebrated exchanges in the whole of the Arabian memory. Abdul-Muttalib went out to the Abyssinian camp with some of his sons, having first stopped to consult his friend Dhu Nafar in his chains, who could only advise him through the elephant-keeper Unays, a friend of them both. When Abraha saw Abdul-Muttalib, whom the sources describe as the most dignified, handsome, and impressive of men, he was so struck by him that he would not let him sit below the throne, nor yet beside it before the eyes of the Abyssinians, so he came down from his seat and sat with him upon the carpet, and asked him through an interpreter what he sought. Abdul-Muttalib replied: I want the king to return the two hundred camels he took from me. Abraha was astonished and told him: you impressed me when I saw you, and you displeased me when you spoke; you ask me about your two hundred camels and say nothing of the building which is your religion and your forefathers' religion, which I have come to destroy. And Abdul-Muttalib answered with the sentence which the Ummah has never tired of repeating: I am the lord of the camels, and the building likewise has a Lord who will defend it. Abraha said: he will not defend it from me. Abdul-Muttalib said: then it is between you and Him. And Abraha returned his camels. What faith, and what clarity: the chief of a defenceless city entrusted a matter too great for men to the One to whom nothing is too great, and his tawakkul was soon to be answered from beyond the horizons. Ibn Ishaq adds that two chiefs who accompanied Abdul-Muttalib, Yahur ibn Nafatha of Banu Bakr and Khuwaylid ibn Wa'ilah of Hudhayl, offered the king one third of the produce of Tihamah if he would withdraw, and he refused; and Ibn Kathir notes soberly that God alone knows whether that occurred.

Abdul-Muttalib returned to Quraysh and ordered them to withdraw into the mountains and the strongholds above the town, and then, as Lings relates, he went with some of his family and others to the Sanctuary, and standing beside the Kaaba he took hold of the metal ring at the middle of its door and prayed: O God, Thy slave protecteth his house; protect Thou Thy House. In Ibn Ishaq's fuller transmission, as Abdul-Muttalib stood holding the door-knocker he recited the verses: O God, Your worshippers protect their homes, so protect Your building; let not their cross and their cunning vanquish Yours tomorrow; if You should leave them free with our qibla, then that is what You will. Ibn Hisham declares that these are the authentic verses of the poem as he found them. Then Abdul-Muttalib released the knocker and went up with the men of Quraysh to the peaks, and Makkah stood empty before the invader, its fate hanging upon the answer which its Lord would give to a grandfather's prayer.

On the morning of the advance Abraha arrayed his army and brought forth his elephant, whose name, the reports preserve, was Mahmud. When it was turned toward Makkah, Nufayl ibn Habib, the reluctant guide, stole close to it, took its ear, and murmured into it: kneel, and go back to where you came from, for you are in God's holy land; then he fled to the mountains. And to the astonishment and despair of the army, the elephant knelt. Al-Suhayli remarks that it is not in the nature of elephants to kneel, and that this itself was the first of the portents. They beat it about the head with iron bars, drove hooks into its hide until it bled, and it would not rise; then they turned it toward Yemen and it rose at once and moved, and turned toward the east and it moved; but no sooner was it faced toward Makkah than it knelt again. The command upon the beast was more powerful than the commands of men, and the whole host stood fixed before the House which they had come to demolish, while the sky above the sea in the west began to darken. Creation itself was refusing to march against the House of its Creator: an elephant bore witness with its knees to what the armies of men would not confess with their tongues.

Then came the answer which Surah Al-Fil has made immortal: Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant? Ibn Ishaq relates that God sent against them birds from the sea like swifts and crows, each one of which carried three stones, one in its beak and one in each claw, the stones like chickpeas and lentils; and Ibn Abi Hatim transmits, from Abu Zurah, from Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Abi Shaybah, from Abu Muawiyah, from al-Amash, from Abu Sufyan, from Ubayd ibn Umayr, that the birds came in groups over their heads, screeched, and dropped what was in their claws and beaks, and that God sent upon them a fierce gale which drove the stones; every man who was struck died, the stone entering at one side and passing out at the other, and the flesh of the bodies began to rot upon the living. Lings records the survivors' memory that the pebbles were so hard and launched with such velocity that they pierced even coats of mail, and that some died quickly and some slowly, and not everyone was struck. The army broke in rout along the road it had come, calling out for Nufayl to guide them home, and they died by every path as they scrambled; so does every host that sets itself against the sanctified purpose of Allah scatter, from the companions of the elephant to the armies of the last age; Abraha himself was struck, and his fingers dropped off his hands one by one as pus and blood poured from them, and when they bore him at last into Sanaa he was like a hatchling bird, and there his heart burst from his breast and he died. Ibn Ishaq adds, on the report of Yaqub ibn Utbah, that measles and smallpox were seen for the first time in the land of the Arabs in that year, and the bitter plants which the Arabs had not known before.

The Qur'an then drew the eternal moral of the miracle in five verses whose every word the exegetes have weighed. The birds are called ababil, flocks, a word which Ibn Hisham says has no singular in Arabic, and which the early authorities explained as groups following one another; some of the Salaf, among them Ibn Abbas, described them as having beaks like birds and paws like dogs, Ikrima said their heads were like the heads of lions and that they came green from the sea, and Ubayd ibn Umayr said they were black sea-birds bearing stones in beak and claw, while other reports from Ibn Abbas likened them to the griffins of North Africa, and Ibn Kathir concludes the survey with the words: but God knows best. The stones are called sijjil, which Yunus the grammarian and Abu Ubaydah explained as meaning very hard or solid, and which some derived from two Persian words conjoined, sanj for stone and jill for clay, so that the compound denotes clay baked to the hardness of stone. And the army is rendered like asf ma'kul, straw or foliage that has been chewed and spat out, the fragile, trampled, broken husk which the beasts have passed over, an image which every reader of the Qur'an can verify against any farmyard: this was the mightiest army that had ever entered the Hijaz, reduced in an hour to chaff.

The year of the event was fixed by the scholars with their usual exactness. Al-Suhayli said that the events of the elephant occurred on the first day of Muharram, in the year eight hundred and eighty-six of the era of Dhul-Qarnayn, Alexander; Ibn Kathir adds that it was the same year in which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was born, as is generally known, while transmitting the range of the other opinions: that the birth followed the elephant attack by a month, or forty days, or fifty days, which Ibn Kathir calls the most favoured date, and that according to Abu Jafar al-Baqir the elephants arrived in mid-Muharram and the birth came fifty-five days thereafter. Other reports which separated the two events by ten, twenty-three, thirty, or forty years Ibn Kathir dismisses with the severity of a hadith master, calling some of them unique and objectionable, some very strange, and one of them, that the Prophet was born fifteen years before the elephant, objectionable and weak; and Khalifah ibn Khayyat transmits that the consensus is that the Prophet ﷺ was born in the year of the elephants' attack. The month of Muharram which the master chronology of this event preserves thus opens the most famous year in the calendar of the Arabs.

The aftermath of the miracle was felt in every quarter of Arabia. After that day, as Lings relates, Quraysh were called by the Arabs the people of God, and they were held in even greater respect than before, because God had answered their prayers and saved the Kaaba; and the poet Abd Allah ibn al-Zibara counted sixty thousand men who did not return to their land, while the verses of Abu Qays ibn al-Aslat and others preserved the terror of the day for Arab memory. Ibn Kathir closes his account with the observation which the believers should carry into every reading of Surah Al-Fil: what God did to the army of the elephant was not a victory of Quraysh over the Abyssinian Christians, for the Abyssinians were then nearer to the truth than the idolatrous Quraysh; rather the victory belonged to the sacred House itself, and served to lay the foundation and pave the way for the mission of Muhammad ﷺ. The House was defended by its Lord not because its custodians were righteous, but because it was to be the qiblah of the final revelation and the birthright of the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ, who was then being carried in the womb of Aminah, and who would one day enter it with his own hands and rid it of its three hundred and sixty idols.

That is the true architecture of the Year of the Elephant: the sanctuary purified by birds from its would-be destroyer, awaiting the son of Abdullah who would purify it from its own idols; the caravan routes of Quraysh saved from ruin, awaiting the day when those same routes would carry the word of Allah to the empires beyond; and the merchants of Makkah honoured among the Arabs as the people of God, awaiting the revelation that would command them: let them worship the Lord of this House, who has fed them against hunger and secured them from fear, the fear which the companions of the elephant had brought to their very gates and from which none but Allah had delivered them. The flocks of birds returned to the sea whence they had come, and the year closed over a quiet town in which a widow of Banu Hashim was nearing her term, and all of history held its breath.