الفيل · الآية 4

Commentary

The choice of the imperfect over the perfect is a choice of language. The perfect shuts the scene and turns it into a memory. The imperfect opens it onto the whole of time. The verse says, in effect: the scene is still open, the bird is still casting, the stone is still falling, wherever a plotting is laid that matches that plotting.

And casting, in the Arabic root r-m-y, is a throw tied to a target. A running (r), then a gathering (m), then an extension and a softness (y): a cast that sets out, carries its weight, and then settles on what it aims at. Hence the word of the Book, ﴿وَمَا رَمَيْتَ إِذْ رَمَيْتَ﴾, "and you did not cast when you cast." The casting comes from the human hand; the aiming comes from above. Here the casting comes from the beak of the bird, and the aiming from the one who sent the bird.

And the pronoun "them" in tarmīhim is an exact designation. It was not the place they had aimed at that was struck, to be kept. Those who aimed at it were struck, to be undone. The stone did not fall on the place desired; it fell on those desiring it. The picture changes altogether. To keep a place behind a wall of fire is to raise a barrier. To keep it by striking the attacker on the head is another thing. Between building an enclosure and turning the answer back on the attacker himself, the whole distance lies.

Stone, in the Arabic root ḥ-j-r, is a hard, clean, extended mass; hence ḥajara, to prevent, because a stone stops whoever meets it. And stone is the common material of every land, known to every human being. Yet the Surah chooses this material of all materials to be the weapon, and not the thunderbolt and not the fire.

And the choice is deliberate. Stone is, in the usage of people, the material both of what is raised and of what falls. A house is built with it, and by it a house comes down. That stone should come down on the one who came to pull down means this: the material a person handles for demolishing what he demolishes and for building what he builds has been given back to him. Whoever came to pull down with stone had stone come down on him from the sky.

And in al-Baqara the stone returns under several faces. Once in the hardness of the heart: ﴿فَهِيَ كَالْحِجَارَةِ أَوْ أَشَدُّ قَسْوَةً﴾, "so they are like stone, or harder still." Once in the fuel of the fire: ﴿وَقُودُهَا النَّاسُ وَالْحِجَارَةُ﴾, "its fuel is people and stones." Once in the coming out of water: ﴿وَإِنَّ مِنَ الْحِجَارَةِ لَمَا يَتَفَجَّرُ مِنْهُ الْأَنْهَارُ﴾, "and among stones there are those from which rivers burst out." Stone in the Qurʾān is not one image but a material whose figures change with the place. And in the Surah of the elephant it is the weapon turned on those who were leaning on their own bulk.

The word sijjīl opens onto two faces. Pure Arabic, first, from the root s-j-l, whence al-sijill, the written register in which things are set down. Borrowed, second, from a Persian compound, sang-gil, stone and clay. And the Book itself supports the second face where it says elsewhere ﴿حِجَارَةً مِّن طِينٍ﴾, "stones of clay." So sijjīl is clay baked and hardened until it becomes stone.

And the figure speaks. A material drawn out of the earth, passed through fire, ripened and then hardened. What a person raises his walls with is exactly this: clay and fire. What comes down on him now is what he himself builds with. No material of a strange kind came, but of the kind he knows. Such is the measure of the return: the maker of a plot is given back his own material, in a shape that carries him off.

And there is a warning here slipped into the shape of a story: the material you build your plotting with one day may be the very material that comes down on you another day. The blow from the sky does not come from an unknown kind. It comes from the kind you handle every day, and for that reason it lands further inside the mind and points better at the meaning.

The verse passes from the bearer to the act. The verb is in the imperfect: tarmīhim (r-m-y), and not a perfect that would shut the scene. An aimed cast runs in front of the reader at every reading; time has not closed the showing. The pronoun "them" designates exactly: the answer did not come down on the place aimed at, to ring it with a barrier, it came down on those who were aiming at it, in their own persons. The weapon is a common material and not a rare one: ḥijāra (ḥ-j-r), hard masses that every person knows. Then the qualifier: min sijjīl (s-j-l), a clay that ran, gathered, and then hardened in heat, the very material one builds with. What a person builds his city with is what fell on those who came against it. The sky has no need of a strange weapon: it gives the maker of a plot his own material back, in a shape he recognizes too late.

Two Readings

The two readings do not conflict. The first describes the matter; the second hears, in its choice, the rhetoric of inversion. This book chooses the additional listening.