The People of Lofty Pillars
After Nūḥ, the Qur'an relates, God raised up ʿĀd — a people of the southern Arabian sands, made successors in the earth after the Flood generation and remembered for a physical stature and building skill that became proverbial: “And He increased you amply in stature.”1 They raised great structures — “Do you construct on every elevation a sign, amusing yourselves?” Hūd asked them — and trusted, as the powerful often do, that their strength placed them beyond reckoning: “And you take for yourselves palaces and fortresses that you might abide eternally… and when you strike, you strike as tyrants.”2
Hūd, one of their own — “their brother,” the Qur'an says, as it calls every messenger sent to warn his own people — brought them the same call every prophet before and after him would bring: “O my people, worship God; you have no deity other than Him. Will you not fear Him?”3 He asked no wage for it: “My reward is only from Him who created me. Then will you not reason?” — the disinterestedness that the Qur'an presents, again and again, as the mark distinguishing a messenger from a man selling a religion.3
The Answer of Strength
ʿĀd's answer was contempt for the very frailty of the man before them: “We see you in foolishness, and indeed, we think you are of the liars.” Hūd's reply is a model of composure under insult — “O my people, there is not foolishness in me, but I am a messenger from the Lord of the worlds. I convey to you the messages of my Lord, and I am to you a trustworthy adviser.”3 They accused him of being touched by their gods with madness; he answered by inviting them to plot against him with everything they had: “So plot against me all together, then do not give me respite. Indeed, I have relied upon God, my Lord and your Lord. There is no creature but that He holds it by its forelock.”4
Hūd pressed them with the ordinary evidence of God's provision — rain sent down in showers, strength added to their strength, gardens and springs and cattle and sons — and warned them plainly against the false gods they had multiplied.5 Their chiefs answered with the logic of the powerful in every age: “Who is greater than us in strength?” — not noticing, the Qur'an observes with quiet irony, that the God who had made them was greater in strength than they.6
The Barren Wind
Drought came first, and it was the drought that set the trap. The end arrived as a black cloud on the horizon that the people of ʿĀd, parched and waiting, mistook for the relief they had been praying for — “This is a cloud bringing us rain,” they said. Hūd told them plainly: “Rather, it is that for which you were impatient: a wind, in which is a painful punishment, destroying everything by command of its Lord.”7
For seven nights and eight days without interruption it tore through them — “a screaming, violent wind” on “a day of continuous misfortune,” plucking the people up “as if they were trunks of palm trees uprooted” — until “they became so that nothing could be seen [of them] except their dwellings.”8 Hūd and those who believed with him were carried through it unharmed: “So We saved him and those with him by mercy from Us, and We eliminated those who denied Our signs.”9
The Qur'an leaves the fate of ʿĀd as one of its recurring warnings — “And that it was ʿĀd, the first, He destroyed” — a civilisation of pillars and palaces reduced, in the space of the same sūrahs that praise their strength, to a name for ruin. Sūrat Hūd closes the account with a phrase it uses of no other people quite so starkly: “Unquestionably, ʿĀd denied their Lord; then away with ʿĀd, the people of Hūd.”1011