وَأَرْسَلَ عَلَيْهِمْ طَيْرًا أَبَابِيلَ
Root r-s-l: to let loose, to send, to let flow. From the same root rasūl (a messenger who is sent), risāla (the office of messenger), mursal (sent).
The choice of the word is meaningful. It does not say "the birds came"; it says they were sent. That is, the birds moved not by their own decision but by a command. The subject of the verb continues from the preceding verse: Rabbuka.
The same root is used in the Qurʾān for the sending of the wind and of punishment as well. This shows how the Qurʾān sees natural events: nature is not a mechanism answerable to itself but an army under orders. "None knows the hosts of your Lord but He" (al-Muddaththir 74/31).
The particle ʿalā conveys coming from above and bringing under pressure. In the Qurʾān punishment is sent "upon them", while mercy is generally expressed with other particles. A small particle draws the direction of the event: from above downward.
There is one more inversion here. The army was coming on foot, over the ground. The answer came from the sky. The battle was not given on the plane the army commanded.
Root ṭ-y-r: to fly. Ṭayr can be used in Arabic both as a singular and as a collective noun; here it is in the plural or generic sense.
The verse does not give the kind of the birds. Various descriptions circulate in the reports (that they resembled swallows, that they were sea birds, that they were black or green); these contradict one another and have no counterpart in the text of the Qurʾān. What the sūra is concerned with is not the species of the birds but that the birds are birds: the smallness of what is set against the elephant.
On the meaning there is broad agreement: groups coming one after another, troop by troop, flock upon flock. The birds came not as a single mass but in waves that followed one another. The best rendering in English is a repetition: "flock upon flock", "troop after troop" — because in English too repetition conveys a scattered multiplicity.
| View | Ground |
|---|---|
| It has no singular; the word is used directly with a plural sense | The famous saying ascribed to al-Farrāʾ: "I have not heard a singular for it." Arabic has plural forms with no singular. |
| Its singular is ibbāla | Ibbāla means a bundle or sheaf bound together; a cluster of birds too was seen as a kind of bundle |
| Its singular is a form such as ibbīl or ibbawl | Weaker proposals transmitted in the dictionaries |
The importance of this debate lies not in the technical detail but here: the word itself is an unfamiliar word even within Arabic. The Qurʾān does not use an ordinary expression for "a crowd of birds"; it chooses a rare word that leaves a mark on the ear. The sound-texture of the sūra bears this out as well: the rhyme abābīl / sijjīl / maʾkūl, with its long ī and ū sounds, makes the stretching out and spreading of the event audible.
A grammatical note: the word abābīl comes in the verse as a diptote (ghayr munṣarif), that is, it takes no tanwīn. This indicates that the plural is in one of the highest plural patterns of Arabic, the one called muntahā al-jumūʿ — it carries an emphasis of multiplicity within itself too.
Ṭayran is indefinite and singular-generic in structure, while its adjective abābīl is plural. In Arabic a generic noun can take a plural adjective; but here a visual effect arises: there is a single "birdness" in the sky, and yet that birdness comes piece by piece, wave upon wave. It is the same picture we build in English when we say "the sky was all bird, flock upon flock".