IN the name of the merciful and compassionate God.
Hast thou not seen what thy Lord did with the fellows of the elephant [1]?
Did He not make their stratagem lead them astray, and send down on them birds in flocks, to throw down on them stones of baked clay, [5] and make them like blades of herbage eaten down?
341:2 Abrahat el Asram, an Abyssinian Christian, and viceroy of the king of Sanaa in Yemen in the year in which Mohammed was born, marched with a large army and some elephants upon Mecca, with the intention of destroying the Kaabah. He was defeated and his army destroyed in so sudden a manner as to have given rise to the p. 342 legend embodied in the text. It is conjectured that small-pox broke out amongst his men. ↩︎