Abstract
Some contemporary mufassirs of the Qurʾān claim that the word ṭayr in the surat al-Fīl does not mean “birds”; rather, it is claimed that this meaning is included in the sources as a result of a wrong perception and it continues until today. According to these scholars, the event, known as the Elephant Incident, occurred as a result of an ordinary natural event and was later transformed into a miraculous nature. One of these claimants is Farāhi (1863-1930). According to him, “When Abraha approached Mecca with his army, the people of Mecca went to the mountain and stoned his soldiers. Just at this time, a sand-stone-soil storm broke out as a result of divine help and as a result of this, some of Abraha's soldiers were destroyed. Later, birds of prey came and cleaned the area by eating the corpses. The fact that those who witnessed the event saw birds and stones in the air at the same time, or that birds and stones were mentioned together in the narrations, caused both the witnesses and the listeners to fall into the delusion that these stones were thrown by the birds. The vast majority of people remained silent in the face of these mysterious accounts; they considered it as a violation of taqwā to research the narrations about this event and to take the most reliable one.”
Mehmet Apaydın, who made a detailed research on this subject wrote a long article called “Ṭayr-Cloud Relationship and the Meaning of Surah Elephant” in order to reveal the true nature of the Fīl event and what the word ṭayr in the surah means, based on the poems and narratives he compiled from the early sources. Apaydın, like Farāhī, is of the opinion that the Fīl event entered the sources after its formation in accordance with today's understanding, and therefore it is meaningless to refer to these sources. However, it is not possible for such an important event to be kept secret without clarification at least in outline, in an environment where every issue is discussed, both for and against, and is included in the riwāyas and sources. In addition, it is a unique fact in history that many people in an important geography like Mecca, while narrating an important event they saw with their eyes during the daytime, agreed on a false and wrong perception.
Apaydın, who mentioned how the Fīl event took place and the classical and contemporary sources on the subject in the introductory part, then explained the concepts with the words in the Sūrat al-Fīl and the related poems and texts. However, it is one of the shortcomings that catches the eye at first glance that the word siccīl is not mentioned both in the sūrat al-Fīl and in some poems.
In the article, first, it has been tried to prove that the word ṭayr is used in the meaning of “cloud” formed by the sand-stone-earth storm in the poems and expressions in which the Fīl event is told. The first thing that stands out in these investigations is that the words are carefully chosen and handled alone, the adjectives explaining the word ṭayr are ignored, especially in some poems and texts, and strange similes that are not used in any language are mentioned.
After the poems and narrations related to the subject, the author presented examples that the word ṭayr is used in the sense of cloud in some verses and ḥadīths. This section may contribute to the proof of the thesis expressed in the article; however, the important thing is to determine the meaning of the word in the sūrat al-Fīl and in the texts describing the Fīl event. In short, the main backbone of the article is the Introduction, the poems and narratives describing the Elephant Incident. Therefore, the subject of this article is limited to these three topics.
The aim of this study, which has been compiled with the analysis method, is to analyze the evidences that the Fīl event does not have miraculous elements and that the word ṭayr in the Sūrat al-Fīl is used not in the sense of “birds”, but in the sense of “clouds consisting of sand-stone-earth storm”. In this study, the three parts of the article mentioned above were examined in detail; it was concluded that a distorted method was used, such as turning the data in favor of the thesis, which was defended with a biased point of view and forced interpretations, instead of coming to a conclusion from the data, and that the evidence presented was far from proving the claimed thesis.