A Word Shared with an Older Destruction

The stones the birds hurl at Abraha's army in Al-Fil are named sijjil, baked or hardened clay (105:4), a term the Quran uses at only a small number of other points, most notably for the stones rained down on the destroyed towns of Lot's people in the narratives told at greater length in Al-Araf, Hud and Al-Hijr. Classical commentators note the shared vocabulary linking two otherwise unconnected destruction narratives, an ancient judgement on Lot's people and a near-contemporary deliverance of Mecca, read as placing both episodes within the same category of divine intervention marked by the same distinctive material.

The word's rarity elsewhere in Arabic outside the Quran has itself drawn philological comment, with some scholars proposing a borrowed origin from Persian, sang u gil, stone and clay, reflecting the term's association in both narratives with a specific, unusual mode of destruction rather than ordinary weapons or natural disaster. Whatever its linguistic history, commentators read the Quran's reuse of the same term across two widely separated narratives as a deliberate thread tying Mecca's deliverance to the same pattern of judgement the Quran elsewhere applies to Lot's destroyed towns.