Surah Al-Fil, The Elephant

Surah 105 · 5 verses · revealed at Mecca

Al-Fil recalls an army that came against the Ka'bah with an elephant, in the year the Prophet was born, and asks whether you have not considered how your Lord dealt with them.

The event was within living memory when the surah was revealed. Arabs dated things by it — the year of the elephant — and older Meccans had seen it. The surah does not need to explain the story because everybody hearing it already knew it.

It says their plan was made to go astray, and that flocks of birds were sent against them, pelting them with stones of baked clay, and that they were left like eaten straw.

Five verses, and the argument is aimed straight at the people of Mecca. The sanctuary they were so proud of guarding had once been defended without them, and their own guardianship of it was therefore not the thing that made them safe.

It runs directly into the surah that follows, Quraysh, which begins by naming the security and the trade that resulted. Some early scholars considered the two a single chapter for that reason.

The commander is named in the histories as Abraha, a governor in the Yemen who had built a great church at Sana'a and wanted the pilgrimage traffic diverted to it. The Qur'an leaves all of that out, mentions only the elephant, and lets the audience supply the rest.

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