The Year of the Elephant

In the very year the Prophet ﷺ was born, the Sacred House faced the greatest threat in its history. Abraha, the Abyssinian ruler of Yemen, had built a magnificent cathedral in San'a and meant to turn the Arabs' pilgrimage to it. When that failed, he marched north with a great army led by an elephant, vowing to tear the Ka'bah down stone by stone.

Quraysh could not dream of fighting such a force. Abraha's men seized camels on the city's outskirts, among them two hundred belonging to 'Abdul-Muttalib. The old chief of Makkah went to the invader's camp, dignified and unafraid, and asked only for his camels back. Abraha was astonished: I came to destroy the house of your glory and you speak to me of camels? 'Abdul-Muttalib's answer became immortal: I am the lord of the camels, and the House has a Lord who will defend it.

Quraysh withdrew to the hills. And as the army advanced on the sanctuary, the elephant knelt and would not move toward Makkah, however it was beaten, though it would rise and march in any other direction. Then the sky filled with flights of birds, each carrying stones, and the army that had come to demolish Allah's House was itself demolished, left like chewed-up straw, as the Qur'an describes. Abraha fled back toward Yemen, dying as he went.

The Arabs never forgot it. They dated their years from it, and the Year of the Elephant became a calendar of its own. In that same year, in the spring, a child was born in Makkah to the clan whose chief had said: the House has a Lord who will defend it.