Sūrah 105 · Āyāt 1–2

“Have you not seen…?” — the question that is a verdict (105:1–2)

The surah opens not with a statement but with a rhetorical question put to the Prophet: {Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the Companions of the Elephant? Did He not make their plot go astray?} Every present source first settles what “seeing” means here. al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) and al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) agree that ruʾya is not ocular sight but knowledge — al-Ṭūsī reasoning that “the sight of the eye does not attach to what has already elapsed,” al-Ṭabarsī adding al-Farrāʾ’s gloss “have you not been informed.” al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) sharpens this: the seeing is “knowledge as manifest as sense-perception,” and the interrogative is inkārī — a denial that functions as emphatic affirmation. All three, with the Enlightening Commentary, note that the Prophet did not witness the event: it fell in the very year of his birth (the ʿām al-fīl). al-Ṭabarsī marshals the chronology debate — most scholars place it in the birth-year against al-Kalbī’s “twenty-three years before” and Muqātil’s “forty” — and preserves the vivid corroborations: ʿAttāb’s retort to ʿAbd al-Malik that “I dropped onto the dung of the elephant,” and ʿĀʼisha’s claim to have seen the elephant’s blind, crippled driver begging at Mecca.

On {the Companions of the Elephant}, the sources converge on the historical frame while differing on detail. al-Ṭabarsī notes the Qurʼanic singular “elephant” is generic and records the dispute over their number — one (named Maḥmūd, per Muqātil), eight (al-Ḍaḥḥāk), or twelve (al-Wāqidī). al-Ṭūsī and the Enlightening Commentary supply the background: Abraha al-Ashram (agnomen Abū Yaksūm), the Abyssinian-appointed ruler of Yemen, built a great church to divert the pilgrimage from the Kaʿba and marched to demolish it when that failed — al-Ṭūsī citing al-Ḥasan’s variant that the campaign was retaliation for Arabs damaging a Christian church. al-Mīzān’s narrational appendix (quoting Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and the Enlightening Commentary both relay the famous confrontation: Abraha’s vanguard seizes ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib’s two hundred camels; when the chief asks only for his camels back, Abraha is incredulous, and ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib answers, “I am the lord of the camels; this House has a Lord who will defend it.”

The Imāmī tradition is voiced most fully by al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) and al-Qummī. Both relay the striking motif of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib addressing the elephant — “O Maḥmūd… they have brought you to demolish the House of your Lord; will you do it?” — which refuses to advance (in al-Qummī’s telling the Abyssinians hack it down with swords for its refusal). al-Baḥrānī adds a markedly embellished narration from al-Mufīd’s Amālī in which the king’s white, jewel-tusked elephant prostrates to ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib and speaks in Arabic, and ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib sends his son ʿAbd Allāh — the Prophet’s father — to Abū Qubays to watch the birds circle the Kaʿba seven times before turning on the army. These details, distinctive to the Imāmī sources and serving to glorify the Prophet’s lineage, are recorded strictly as transmitted, their chains not independently vetted. On {their plot go astray}, al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī fixes the sense precisely: kayd is their evil design on the Sacred House, and taḍlīl the rendering of their effort errant — “they marched to destroy the Kaʿba and it ended with the destruction of their own selves” — while the Enlightening Commentary stresses that the plot’s failure only magnified the Kaʿba’s fame.