al-Fīl 105:2

A lam yajʿal kaydahum fī taḍlīl "Did He not bring their scheme to nothing?"

The verse again begins with a negative question. In Arabic a negative question (a lam) is in fact a strong affirmation: "did He not do it?" = "of course He did, and you know it too." It is the same thing we do in English with "and did he not do exactly that?"

That the two verses come one after the other in the same form shows that the two are two faces of a single event: the first verse shows the event from outside ("what He did"), the second gives the inner logic of the event ("He brought their plans to nothing").

Root k-y-d. In the dictionary: to try to do something secretly and by an indirect route; to lay a trick; to prepare an arrangement by which the other party will be harmed without noticing it.

The word's most decisive property is secrecy. An open attack is not called kayd; kayd is a calculated, planned mechanism that the other side cannot see. For this reason the Qurʾān generally uses the word kayd for the arrangement the strong set against the weak.

A question arises here: if Abraha marched openly with his army, where is the hidden plan? The answer the classical exegetes give is reasonable: the kayd is not the march of the army but the calculation behind the intention. According to the report, on the surface there was a matter of building a temple and a centre of pilgrimage; the real target was to do away with Mecca's position in the region. That is, there was as much a strategy as a military movement, and a strategy is by definition hidden.

The root's other occurrences in the Qurʾān open the horizon:

• "Thus did We contrive for Joseph (Yūsuf)" (Yūsuf 12/76) — here kayd is ascribed to God and is not negative; it means "the fine measure that turns their calculation back upon them".
• "They are devising a scheme, and I am devising a scheme" (al-Ṭāriq 86/15-16) — these two verses are like the general statement of the principle of Sūrat al-Fīl.

The measure that follows from this is: what the Qurʾān makes a matter of discussion is not the evil plan itself but in whose hand the plan will come to its end. Making a plan is not forbidden; what is said is that the final verdict on a plan does not lie with man.

Root ḍ-l-l: to lose the way, to stray, to fail to find the target. Ḍalāl is going astray; ḍāll is one who strays.

The word here is on the tafʿīl pattern (taḍlīl), and in Arabic this pattern conveys causation: not to stray but to make stray; not to be lost but to cause to be lost.

To render it "being brought to nothing" is right, but it misses the picture in the word. The real picture is this: a plan is like a traveller who has set out towards his destination. Taḍlīl is to make that traveller lose his way. The plan is not destroyed, it is put off its road. The army was not repulsed, nor was it annihilated — it failed to arrive. The difference between the two fits exactly the form of the event the sūra describes.

Here is the real point in the word order. The verse does not say "He brought their scheme to nothing"; it says "He placed their scheme inside a bringing-to-nothing". The verb is jaʿala (to make, to place), the particle is fī (inside).

In Arabic fī conveys containment: a vessel, a taking-in, an enclosing. That is, the plan has been set inside the state of coming to nothing; no blow fell upon it from outside, it fell into a condition that surrounded it from beginning to end.

The meaning of this is: the plan did not break down at some one point, it did not work at any point. The march was in vain, the preparation was in vain, the elephants were in vain. Coming to nothing is not a stage of the plan but its element.

There is an indefiniteness (tanwīn) too: taḍlīlin, "a bringing to nothing". In Arabic indefiniteness here conveys magnification (taʿẓīm): not an ordinary one, but one hard to describe.

The measure the two verses build together is this: the size of the preparation is no guarantee of the outcome.

This can be read as a sentence of religious consolation; but it is at the same time an observable rule of history. In military history it is not rare for a superior force to be caught on a small variable that was not reckoned with: climate, disease, logistics, terrain. How Abraha's expedition ended is disputed; that the expedition ended and failed to reach its target is not.

What the sūra does is to assign an agent to this fact. It is possible to read it as "coincidence" as well; the sūra reads it otherwise, and it gives the ground for its reading in the verses that follow.