6 Quranic stories and what other sources say

The Quran tells of a people of rock-cut homes, to whom the prophet Salih was sent, and who hamstrung the she-camel and were destroyed.^[1] Outside sources do mention the people: an Assyrian inscription of Sargon II (715 BC) records a campaign against a people called the Tamudi in Arabia, and Greek and Roman writers mention the Thamud.^[2]

The place is usually taken to be Hegra (Mada’in Salih) in northwest Arabia, with its rock-cut tombs, which was the first place in Saudi Arabia on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.^[3] On the way to Tabuk the Prophet told his men not to enter the place except weeping.^[4]

An honest account adds a qualification. The monumental tombs at Hegra were cut by the Nabataeans in the first centuries before and after Christ, long after the Assyrian record, so they cannot be the homes of the people the Quran describes. What links the site to Thamud is the tradition of the region and the Prophet’s own words about it. The Quran gives no date, and says only that the Thamud carved dwellings in the mountains (7:74).

The Quran speaks of ‘Ad, a people with great pillars, destroyed by a violent wind that blew for seven nights and eight days.^[5] It names Iram “of the pillars” and says that its like had not been created in the land. The prophet Hud was sent to them, and the Quran places them at al-Ahqaf, a word for sand dunes. No inscription mentions them by that name with certainty.

In the 1990s a team led by the filmmaker Nicholas Clapp claimed that a site at Shisr in Oman was the lost city of Ubar, which some identify with Iram, but the claim is disputed.^[6] Critics say that the remains are of a fortified caravan station of a later date and that the link to a city of the ‘Ad is a guess. The sensible statement is that ‘Ad is a people of the remote past of southern Arabia, remembered in the Quran and in Arabian tradition, and archaeology has not settled the matter.

A lack of inscriptions fits what the Quran says, since it describes a people who left no survivors to write a record, and the desert covers a great deal. It is a gap in the evidence and no objection to the account.

The Quran tells of young men who fled persecution, slept in a cave for 309 years and woke to a changed world.^[7] The story is known in Christian tradition as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, told in a Syriac homily by Jacob of Serugh (died 521).^[8] The parallel is plain, and a sceptic will say the Quran took the tale from its neighbours.

The Quran does not name the city and does not fix the number, saying that some say three, some five, some seven, “and God knows best their number.”^[9] Its own telling differs in emphasis. The youths speak a short creed, “Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth; we will never call upon any god besides Him” (18:14), and when the townspeople find them, they disagree about what to do with the place. The account declares itself a true report (18:13).

Muslims take the story as a sign of resurrection, with no dependence on a particular source. The Quran says so itself: the people were made to find them so that they would know the promise of God is true (18:21).

The “Two-Horned One” travels east and west and builds a barrier against Gog and Magog.^[10] The verse opens with the words “They ask you about Dhu al-Qarnayn,” so the audience already knew of a figure of that name. Many classical commentators took him for Alexander the Great, and some modern scholars point to a Syriac legend of Alexander from about 629 with similar episodes, among them a gate against northern peoples.^[11]

Muslim scholars note that the Quran does not name him, and that its portrait is of a just believer who credits his power to God, which Alexander was not. He says of the barrier, “This is a mercy from my Lord”, and he treats the people he meets with a mixture of justice and mercy. Some have suggested a different figure, such as Cyrus the Great, as the Indian scholar Abul Kalam Azad argued, and others a south Arabian king.^[12]

The question is open. If the Quran drew on a legend, it altered the central figure into a believer, and if it spoke of a real ruler, his name is lost. Either way the passage reads as a moral portrait.

Surah 105 recalls that God turned back an army with an elephant. The background is Abraha, the Aksumite viceroy of Yemen, whose inscriptions record campaigns in central Arabia in the sixth century. The Arabs dated events from “the year of the elephant”, close to the Prophet’s birth.^[13]

Here the Quran’s allusion matches a historical figure known from inscriptions, and the surah was addressed to people who remembered the event. It asks, “Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?”, a question put to people who had seen it or heard it from their fathers.

The limits of the match should be stated. Abraha’s inscription at Murayghan, dated to 552, records a campaign against Arab tribes and says nothing of a march on Mecca. The expedition against the Kaaba, its failure, and the date are known from Arabic tradition and the surah, and historians differ on the year. The inscription establishes that Abraha was a real ruler active in central Arabia at about this time.

The Quran says that Jonah was sent to a hundred thousand or more, and that they believed and were spared, the only town in the Quran about which that is said.^[14] Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, whose ruins stand by modern Mosul, and the Hebrew Bible tells the story in the Book of Jonah. A shrine of the prophet there was destroyed in 2014.

The two accounts agree that the city repented and was spared. They differ in detail: the Book of Jonah gives the number as more than a hundred and twenty thousand and spends its closing chapter on the prophet’s anger at God’s mercy, while the Quran describes his distress inside the fish and his prayer, “There is no god but You; glory to You; I was among the wrongdoers” (21:87). No Assyrian record mentions the city’s repentance, and a sceptic may call the story legend. The reply is that the Quran’s claim concerns a town of ordinary people who believed, which a royal chronicle would be unlikely to record, and that the city itself, which fell in 612 BC, is firmly historical.