إِيلَافِهِمْ رِحْلَةَ الشِّتَاءِ وَالصَّيْفِ
Īlāfihim riḥlata'sh-shitāʾi wa'ṣ-ṣayf "Their being accustomed to the journey of winter and of summer."
The word īlāf is repeated in two consecutive verses. In Arabic rhetoric such repetition is not idle; it is generally done for magnification (tafkhīm) and for explanation.
The grammarians mostly treat this second īlāf as an appositive substitute for the first: the first verse names the favour ("the familiar order of Quraysh"), the second describes it ("that is, their being accustomed to these two journeys"). The second verse does not repeat the first; it fills it in. The general first, the extent after.
One further point of word order: riḥlata comes in the accusative. The reason is that the verbal noun (īlāf) works like its own verb and can take an object. The sentence therefore functions like a verbal sentence in the dress of a noun: "his accustoming them to the journey of…". That Arabic can make a verbal noun do this much work is what makes a sūra this short possible.
Root r-ḥ-l: to set out, to migrate. Raḥl is the saddle put on a camel; rāḥila is the riding camel. The concrete core of the word is the tying of a load onto a camel's back.
Riḥla is on the fiʿla pattern, and this pattern in Arabic conveys the manner of doing, the form a single performance takes. What is meant is therefore not an ordinary going but a journey made by a known method, on a settled order. It is close to the English "expedition" in this respect: both the journey and the institutionalised form of that journey.
The word is also singular: one riḥla is used for two journeys. This implies that the two are two legs of a single order — not separate expeditions but one cycle spread across the year.
The Qurʾān does not say where the journeys went. It gives only their seasons. It is the exegetical and biographical tradition that supplies the directions; the two must be kept apart.
According to the widespread report: south in winter, to Yemen; north in summer, to Syria. The geographical logic is clear and can still be verified today: in winter the north (the Syria–Palestine line) is cold and the passes are hard; in summer the south (the Tihāma–Yemen coastal strip) is extremely hot and humid. Splitting the two halves of the year between two directions is not a preference for a caravan but a necessity.
Some reports name other directions as well (towards Abyssinia, towards Iraq, Ṭāʾif). These are less widespread. That the Qurʾān specifies no direction shows that the matter is not geography but order: that both halves of the year be productive, that no season pass empty.
When Abraham (Ibrāhīm) left his family there he prayed: "Our Lord! I have settled some of my offspring in a valley where nothing grows, by Your sacred House… So incline the hearts of some people towards them, and provide them with fruits" (Ibrāhīm 14/37).
This verse is the economic definition of Mecca: agriculture is impossible. The valley is rocky, there is no running water, seasonal rainfall is irregular. The basic condition for a settlement to survive — producing its own food — is not available here.
There is only one way for a city to exist in such a place: to bring things in. And that requires two things — a network to carry the goods, and a security that protects that network. Mecca had both, and both rested on the same cause: the Kaʿba.
"Have We not settled them in a safe sanctuary to which the fruits of all things are gathered and brought?" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/57) — note: not "which they produce" but "which is brought". The city is not a centre of production but a point of collection.
"Have they not seen that We made a safe sanctuary while people are snatched away all around them?" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/67) — this verse states plainly that the safety was a regional exception. The surrounding country is a country of raiding and highway robbery; Mecca is not.
"God has made the Kaʿba, the sacred House, a means of standing for people; and the sacred month too…" (al-Māʾida 5/97) — the word qiyām here means "livelihood, that on which standing depends". The Kaʿba is as much an economic infrastructure as a religious building; and the verse names it together with the sacred months, because the two are parts of one system.
The core of the order the Meccans built is this: throughout the four months in which fighting was forbidden, highway robbery and blood feud were suspended across Arabia. In those months fairs were held, the pilgrimage was made, caravans moved. The inviolability of the Kaʿba and of the sanctuary was the ground of that calendar — and Quraysh, standing as the keepers of that inviolability, were indirectly the guarantors of the whole system.
The consequence is this: to attack a caravan of Quraysh was not an ordinary robbery but the breaking of an order from which everyone benefited. The safety of the caravan came not from an army but from a shared interest and a religious reverence. This is a fairly pure example of what is called soft power.
The biographical sources add a further layer of agreements: it is transmitted that the leading men of Quraysh — Hāshim and his brothers in particular — made agreements of passage and protection with neighbouring states (the Byzantine governorship of Syria, Abyssinia, Yemen, the Persian/Iraqi side) securing the safety of the caravans, and that these agreements too were called īlāf. The symmetrical account in which four brothers are distributed to four directions may have been arranged in a later period; but the existence of such agreements is plausible in terms of how long-distance caravan trade works. I transmit this as a report.
The classical account pictures Mecca as a great transit centre through which the spice and incense trade of the Indian Ocean was passed northward. This picture has been criticised, particularly from the 1980s onward; the best-known objection is Patricia Crone's Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987). Crone argued that Mecca does not appear as an international centre of trade in the external sources of the period, that the incense route had largely lost its vitality by then, and that Meccan trade was rather a regional activity running on hides, skins and local goods. The thesis has been debated, partly criticised and partly accepted; no settled conclusion has been reached.
What effect does this have on the sūra? Surprisingly little. The sūra does not say that Mecca was rich on an imperial scale. What it says is more basic: that these people could fill their stomachs and could be safe. Whether the trade was small or large does not change these two outcomes for people living in a valley where nothing grows. The language of the sūra already speaks in terms not of luxury but of the minimum: to feed against hunger, to secure against fear.