The Year of the Elephant

In the year the Prophet ﷺ was to be born, the gravest threat yet came upon Mecca from the south. Abraha al-Ashram was the viceroy of Yemen under the Najashi, not the same Najashi to whom the Companions would later emigrate, but a predecessor, for the Najashi had conquered parts of Yemen and set Abraha over it as his governor.

Each year Abraha watched his people journey north, and he asked them where they were going. "To Hajj," they said, "to the House of Allah." So he resolved: "I will build you a house far better than it, and you shall make your pilgrimage here." He raised a vast cathedral in Yemen, of stone and stained glass, the like of which had not been seen in Arabia, intending it to become the greatest church in the whole peninsula, and he commanded the Arabs to turn their pilgrimage to it instead of the Ka'bah.

When one of the bedouin Arabs heard of this, he went into the cathedral and defiled it, relieving himself within it in contempt for Abraha's design to replace the Sacred House. Abraha flew into a rage and swore: "As revenge, I will destroy that House, so that the people must come to mine."

So he gathered his army; and because his people were from Abyssinia, they brought with them elephants, beasts unknown in Arabia, which the Africans had trained for war. He marched upon the Ka'bah with a host spearheaded by elephants, some say eight, others as many as twenty, the greatest of them a mighty elephant named Mahmud.

On the way he hired an Arab guide named Abu Rughal to lead him through the passes to Mecca. For this treachery, selling his honour to lead Abraha to the Sacred House, Abu Rughal became a byword among the Arabs, who would say for generations, "More treacherous than Abu Rughal."

When Abraha reached Mecca he seized the livestock of Abdul-Muttalib, more than two hundred camels, a sign of how wealthy the Quraysh had now become. Then Abdul-Muttalib came before him: a tall man, far above the height of the other Arabs, handsome and commanding, the very image of a leader.

So struck was Abraha by his bearing that he rose from his throne and sat beside him upon the ground out of respect. He said to him, "I have nothing against you or your people. Leave the city, and I will destroy only your House of worship, there is nothing in this against you."

But Abdul-Muttalib answered, "I have not come to you about the House. I have come to you about my camels." At this Abraha lost all respect for him and said, "I have come to tear down the House that is your honour and your religion, and you speak to me of your camels?" And Abdul-Muttalib gave his famous reply:

أَنَا رَبُّ ٱلْإِبِلِ، وَإِنَّ لِلْبَيْتِ رَبًّا سَيَمْنَعُهُ

"I am the lord of the camels, and the House has a Lord who will protect it." So Abraha returned his camels.

Then the Quraysh withdrew to the mountain passes, and Abdul-Muttalib clung to the door of the Ka'bah and pleaded that Allah defend His House, and they left the city in the hands of its Lord.

When the army turned the great elephant Mahmud towards the Ka'bah, it knelt and would not rise, though they beat it until it bled; yet whenever they turned it any other way, it hurried forward. Years later, when the Prophet's ﷺ she-camel knelt at Hudaybiyyah, he said of her:

حَبَسَهَا حَابِسُ ٱلْفِيلِ

"She has been restrained by the One who restrained the elephant."

And as the host stood debating what to do, Allah sent against them flights of birds, the Abābīl, each bearing stones of baked clay, as He records in Sūrat al-Fīl:

وَأَرْسَلَ عَلَيْهِمْ طَيْرًا أَبَابِيلَ، تَرْمِيهِم بِحِجَارَةٍ مِّن سِجِّيلٍ، فَجَعَلَهُمْ كَعَصْفٍ مَّأْكُولٍ

"And He sent against them birds in flocks, striking them with stones of baked clay, and made them like devoured stubble." Wherever a stone struck a man or a beast, its flesh dissolved away before the very eyes of the Quraysh, until the army was destroyed.

Abraha himself suffered the worst of it. He was carried back towards Yemen as his body rotted limb by limb, and he died just as he reached his city, tasting the full measure of the punishment.

The traces of that year remained even when the Prophet ﷺ was born. The companion Qubath ibn Ashyam, asked by a caliph whether he or the Prophet ﷺ was the elder, replied, ٱلرَّسُولُ ﷺ أَكْبَرُ مِنِّي، وَأَنَا أَسَنُّ مِنْهُ, "The Messenger of Allah ﷺ is greater than me, but I am older than him", for he remembered, as a child, being shown the withered, yellowed dung of Abraha's elephants; and the Prophet ﷺ was born in that very Year of the Elephant.

And Aisha would recall seeing, years later in Mecca, one of Abraha's elephant-drivers, now blind and broken, begging in the streets to the end of his days, a living sign of the ruin Allah had brought upon them.

It was an event Allah recorded in Sūrat al-Fīl, and it gave the house of Abdul-Muttalib such standing that, generations later at the Battle of Hunayn, the Prophet ﷺ would proclaim before the Quraysh:

أَنَا ٱلنَّبِيُّ لَا كَذِبْ، أَنَا ٱبْنُ عَبْدِ ٱلْمُطَّلِبْ

"I am the Prophet, there is no lie; I am the son of Abdul-Muttalib."