An elephant in a dream

Surah al-Fil has 5 verses, and none of them names a city, a shrine or a king. It asks whether you have not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant (Qur'an 105:1), and then answers briefly: their plan was made to go astray, flocks of birds struck them with stones of hard clay, and they were left like eaten straw (Qur'an 105:2-5). Where it happened and who they were, the surah leaves to other texts.

The odd thing is that the elephant isn't the villain. It is the army's mark, a way of naming the largest force of its day, and what the Qur'an shows is that force undone by something small. That is the picture an elephant carries into dream interpretation, and we'll look at it before the dictionaries come in.

Five verses and what they leave out

Read the surah again and count what it gives. It names "the companions of the elephant" and not the animal alone. It names their plan first, saying it was made to go astray, before the birds are even mentioned. It sends birds, in flocks, and the weapon is clay stones, not a rival army. And it ends on a plain image of ruin. Nothing in it says how large the army was or what it intended to do.

Everything that places the event comes from outside the surah. The next surah turns to the Lord of "this House", who fed the Quraysh against hunger and made them safe from fear (Qur'an 106:3-4), and the Qur'an does not say more about the link than that. The Prophet ﷺ supplies the place in his own words, which is why we look at them next.

The camel that sat down, and a narrator's doubt

At Hudaybiyyah the Prophet's she-camel, al-Qaswa, knelt down in the narrow pass that led towards Makkah and would not rise. The people said she had become stubborn. He answered that stubbornness was not her habit, but that she had been held by the One who held back the elephant, and he went on to say that if Quraysh asked him for anything that respected Allah's ordinances, he would grant it (Bukhari 2731). The elephant is his reference point for a march on Makkah stopped by Allah.

When Makkah was later opened to him he used it again, saying that Allah had held back the elephant from the city and given its rule to His Messenger and the believers (Muslim 1355a). One narration of the speech has the narrator unsure whether the Prophet said "the killing" or "the elephant", a doubt that arises because the 2 Arabic words, القتل and الفيل, look so alike in writing (Bukhari 112). Other narrations of the same speech have the elephant (Muslim 1355a, Bukhari 6880).

In both sayings the elephant is shorthand for Allah holding something back at the approach to Makkah.

There is a third use, and it has nothing to do with armies. Describing the Lote Tree of the utmost boundary, which he was shown in the seventh heaven, the Prophet said its leaves were as big as the ears of elephants and its fruit like the jars of Hajr (Bukhari 3887, Bukhari 3207, Muslim 162a). Here the animal is simply the measure of something enormous, and it is a comparison made about heaven. It lends some support to reading an elephant by its size, though the hadith interprets no dream.

Reading size as power

The dictionary tradition reads the elephant first by size, as the greatest of the land animals and so as power, often a ruler's or a great man's. Riding it is read as rank and authority, and being chased or trampled by it as pressure from someone stronger. All of that is reasoning by size, with no text behind it. The Qur'an's own elephant enters the picture only on the question of whether power is secure.

Who is dreaming matters for the last row. Someone up against an employer, an institution or a court has a reason to find the surah relevant, and someone who holds the power has a reason to hear it as a caution. That is our application of the surah. It describes a single event and promises nobody the same ending in a rivalry of their own.