فيل

Core meaning

Judgment that fails: a mind that no longer guides itself, not the animal.

Uses

1. ٱلْفِيل → "unreason" : the only use, which names a people by what defines it; أَصْحَٰب is rendered "companions", as everywhere (see صحب).

   • «أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِأَصْحَٰبِ ٱلْفِيلِ» — "Have you not seen how your Guardian dealt with the companions of unreason?" (105:1)

Evidence from the text

The word occurs only once: the surah itself, and the corpus it recalls, give its meaning. It opens with "Have you not seen how your Guardian dealt with", a question that opens, elsewhere, only the passage of 89:6, for the Aad, the Thamud and Fir'awn, whose fate the corpus has already shown. The question does not narrate: it recalls a story the corpus has shown clearly elsewhere.

The stones point to that story: "stones of formed clay" (105:4) fall elsewhere only on the people of Lut, in 11:82 and 15:74: "and rained upon them stones of formed clay." (15:74). The scheme led astray is theirs: "They sought to turn him away from his guests, so We obliterated their eyes" (54:37), and the messengers had told Lut: "they will never reach you." (11:81).

This people is the one whose judgment failed: Lut asks them "is there not among you a well-advised man?" (11:78). The companions of unreason are those who lacked that well-advised man. The usage of the language, which calls a man of weak judgment فِيلُ ٱلرَّأْيِ, agrees with this reading; the corpus is enough to establish it, and it is the corpus that confirms this usage.

The surah is therefore not a story on its own: it adds a brick to the account of Lut, the means of the punishment. The messengers who came to Ibrahim say so: they are there "to send upon them stones of clay, marked with your Guardian for the excessive." (51:32-34); surah 105 tells how these stones, prepared with the Guardian, were carried onto them: by massive birds, sent upon them.

Distinctions

• افل — to disappear: "but when it disappeared" (6:76-78), the setting of a star; neighbouring consonants, a different root: فِيل keeps the ي of its root
• رشد — to be well-advised (11:78): what the people of Lut lacked

See also

لوط (Lut) · سجيل (the stones of formed clay)