Abrahah's March
Around the year 570, Abrahah al-Ashram, the Abyssinian viceroy of Yemen, built in Ṣanʿāʾ a magnificent cathedral — al-Qullays — intending to divert the Arabs' pilgrimage from Makkah to his own city. When the plan failed and the church was defiled by an Arab, Abrahah swore to march north and tear the Kaʿbah down stone from stone. He set out with a great army, led — in the memory of the Arabs — by a war elephant, a creature never before seen in the Hijaz.12
Unable to resist such a force, the Makkans withdrew to the hills. Their chief, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim — grandfather of the Prophet — went to Abrahah to ask only for the return of his seized camels. When Abrahah expressed surprise that he pleaded for camels rather than for the sanctuary, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib gave the answer the sīrah has preserved: “I am the lord of the camels; as for the House, it has a Lord who will defend it.”13
The Birds of ʿAbābīl
At the edge of the sacred territory the elephant knelt and would not advance toward the Kaʿbah, though it rose willingly when turned toward Yemen. Then, the Qur'an relates, God sent against the army “birds in flights, striking them with stones of baked clay, and He made them like devoured straw.”4 The army broke and perished in its retreat; Abrahah himself died on the road back to Ṣanʿāʾ. The deliverance so marked the Arab imagination that the year became an epoch: the Year of the Elephant, from which the Makkans dated events for a generation.125
A Child of Banū Hāshim
In that same year — by the reckoning most widely accepted, on a Monday in the month of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, corresponding to about 570 or 571 CE — a boy was born in Makkah to Āminah bint Wahb of the clan of Zuhrah. His father, ʿAbdullāh, the beloved youngest son of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, had died on a trading journey to Yathrib months before the child's birth. The boy entered the world an orphan.256
His lineage was the noblest of Quraysh: Muḥammad, son of ʿAbdullāh, son of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, son of Hāshim — of the line of ʿAdnān, and through him, as the Arabs held, of Ismāʿīl son of Ibrāhīm. His grandfather carried the infant into the Kaʿbah, gave thanks, and named him Muḥammad — “the oft-praised” — a name then almost unknown among the Arabs. Asked why he had chosen it, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib is reported to have said: “I desired that my grandson be praised in the heavens and praised on earth.”156
The Prophet ﷺ would later say, tracing the arc that began in those days: “I am the answer to the prayer of my father Ibrāhīm, the glad tidings of ʿĪsā, and the vision my mother saw when she gave birth to me — a light went forth from her which lit the castles of Syria.”7