The Church of Al-Qullays

Abraha al-Ashram, the Abyssinian (Aksumite) viceroy who governed Yemen from San'a, saw how the Arabs made their pilgrimage to the Ka'bah at Mecca, and how it gathered to that city honour and trade. Envious, he resolved to turn the pilgrimage towards himself. He raised in San'a a magnificent cathedral, which the Arabs called Al-Qullays (ٱلْقُلَّيْس), adorned with marble, gold and mosaic, and wrote to his king, the Negus of Abyssinia, that he would not rest until he had diverted the pilgrimage of the Arabs to it.

Word of his boast spread among the Arabs and enraged them, for the Ka'bah of Ibrahim was dearer to them than any building. According to the accounts of the sirah, one of the Arabs, a man of the Kinanah, by some reports a passing bedouin, entered the great church and defiled it, relieving himself within it and leaving it fouled, in open contempt for Abraha's design to replace the Sacred House.

When Abraha learned that his cathedral had been defiled, he flew into a rage and swore that he would not rest until he had marched upon the Ka'bah and pulled it down stone by stone. He gathered a great army, set at its head a mighty elephant, and advanced from San'a towards Mecca, the campaign that became known as the Year of the Elephant, of which Allah revealed an entire Surah:

أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِأَصْحَابِ ٱلْفِيلِ، أَلَمْ يَجْعَلْ كَيْدَهُمْ فِي تَضْلِيلٍ

"Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant? Did He not make their plot go astray?" (al-Fīl 105:1-2). His host was turned back, destroyed by birds bearing stones of baked clay, so the very insult to Al-Qullays became the occasion of its builder's ruin.