al-Fīl 105:1

A lam tara kayfa faʿala Rabbuka bi-aṣḥābi'l-fīl "Have you not seen what your Lord did to the companions of the elephant?"

The sūra's first difficulty is in its first words. According to the traditional dating the Prophet was born in the year this event took place; that is, he did not see it. For those who accept an earlier dating he had not yet been born. What, then, does "have you not seen?" mean?

The answer lies in the range of the Arabic verb رأى (raʾā). This verb expresses seeing with the eye, but it also expresses knowing, grasping, coming to a conviction. English has the same extension: when we say "you see that this will not work", no one is speaking of the eye. In Arabic the usage is more firmly settled; indeed, for the usage that expresses seeing with the heart there is a separate grammatical behaviour (it takes two objects).

There is decisive evidence for this from within the Qurʾān. The same form is used for events no one could have seen with the eye:

• "Have you not seen what your Lord did to ʿĀd?" (al-Fajr 89/6) — the people of ʿĀd are centuries earlier than the addressees.
• "Have you not seen those who went out from their homes in their thousands, in fear of death?" (al-Baqara 2/243) — a very old, indeed an indeterminate, event.

So a lam tara is a formula the Qurʾān uses to say "look at this thing everyone knows". The source of the knowledge is not the eye but widespread and undisputed report. Its equivalent in today's language is: "Do you not remember that famous affair?"

There is a second reason as well. It is transmitted in the reports that people who survived the event crippled were seen begging in Mecca for years afterwards. If this report is sound, then "seeing" rests partly on an actual seeing as well as on a metaphor: if not the event itself, then its traces could still be seen. I transmit this detail as a report; I make no claim to certainty.

The point to be noticed: the question is not "what happened" but "how did He do it". In Arabic kayfa asks after the manner — that is, the occurrence of the event is taken as granted, and what is asked about is its form.

Rhetorically this is a very strong construction. It obliges the addressee to accept the event; the only thing opened to discussion is its detail. Had the sūra said "Do you know that your Lord did something to the companions of the elephant?", the door would have been left open to denial. When it says "Have you not seen how He did it?", the event is given, and what is asked to be thought about is the manner.

The agent is stated openly, and it does not say "God"; it says "Rabbuka" — your Lord.

Two things are done at once:

First, the owner of the act is assigned. The Meccans knew that event, but they were able to read it as "the Kaʿba protected itself", "the blessedness of the House protected it". The sūra cuts this off: the one who acted is the Lord. Not the House, but the Owner of the House.

Second — and this is finer — the address is to the Prophet, who at that moment was in a position in Mecca of being alone, powerless and mocked. The expression "your Lord" builds a consolation: the One who stands by you is the One who once halted a whole army. The sūra is a sentence of assurance as much as it is a historical narrative. That the Qurʾān uses the address "rabbuka" most in the early Meccan sūras, where the Prophet is being supported, bears out this reading (al-Ḍuḥā 93/3, 5; al-Inshirāḥ 94/8, for example).

Root ṣ-ḥ-b: to accompany something, to be together with it, not to part from it. Ṣāḥib means a companion on the road; ṣuḥba is from the same root, "being together".

The Qurʾān names communities with this form very often, and it ties the naming to the one thing that defines that community: aṣḥāb al-kahf (the companions of the cave), aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd (the companions of the trench), aṣḥāb al-sabt (the companions of the sabbath), aṣḥāb al-janna (the companions of the garden).

There is a diminishment in the naming here, and it is deliberate. The commander of the army is not mentioned, his state is not mentioned, the imperial connection is not mentioned. They are named by an animal. This community, which in history called itself "the Abyssinian army", "the forces of the governor of Yemen", passes into the Qurʾān's record as "those beside the elephant". What they trusted in became their name.

This is a method the Qurʾān uses often: to name a person by what he leans on. When the outcome appears, the name turns into irony — the elephant not only failed to save them, it became the one thing left of them in memory.

That the word passed into Arabic from Persian (pīl) is a view widely accepted among the lexicographers. The elephant is not an animal of Arabia; neither is the word.

The function of the elephant in this event has to be understood. In sixth-century Arabia the elephant is less an instrument of war than an instrument of display. The elephant that walks before the army through a region whose people had seen camels and horses but never an elephant is an element of propaganda: we hold a power you do not know. In today's language, a show of force for the sake of deterrence.

The whole logic of the sūra is built here. The largest animal was brought; what halted it was a bird. The scale is inverted, and this inversion is the sūra's main argument: power is not measured by size.

Immediately before Sūrat al-Fīl comes Sūrat al-Humaza, and there the man "who amasses wealth and counts it over and over, supposing that his wealth will make him immortal" is described (al-Humaza 104/2-3). That is, the individual illusion of power.

Sūrat al-Fīl describes the collective form of the same illusion: an army, an elephant, imperial backing. The end of both is the same. And the Sūrat Quraysh that follows says where real security comes from. The three sūras together build a chain of argument: wealth cannot protect, an army cannot protect; the one who protects is the Lord of the House.