Recalls the story, well known to its Meccan audience, of an Abyssinian army with war elephants that marched to destroy the Kaaba and was turned back by flocks of birds pelting them with stones — traditionally dated to around the year of Muhammad's birth, c. 570 CE, and invoked here as proof that Mecca's sanctuary had already been divinely protected once before. It describes the attacking army's birds dropping stones of baked clay, leaving the attackers "like eaten straw" — an agricultural image of complete devastation applied to what had been, until that point, a serious military threat. The surah briefly notes that the attacking force is referred to as "companions of the elephant," a phrase so specific and historically grounded that later Islamic tradition used it to fix an entire calendar year, treating this single military event as a shared reference point across the wider community's memory.
A well-known historical reference point (traditionally near Muhammad's birth year) used to show Mecca's sanctuary had been protected before. This event, traditionally called the Year of the Elephant, is frequently used as a fixed historical reference point in the traditional Islamic calendar, with other events (including Muhammad's birth) dated relative to it. Using a single military event to anchor communal memory and later calendar dating is often cited as an example of how the Quran's historical references became embedded in broader Arabian and later Islamic chronology, well beyond the immediate religious content.