What does “faja alahum ka asfim ma’kul” mean (Qur’an 105:5)?
“Fajaʿalahum ka-ʿaṣfin maʾkūl” is the closing line of Surah Al-Fil, and the verse reads: “and left them like chewed-up straw.” [Qur’an 105:5]. In Arabic it is written فَجَعَلَهُمْ كَعَصْفٍ مَّأْكُولٍۭ. Word by word: “fa” is the connector “and then”, tying this line to the four before it; “jaʿalahum” is “he made them”, a verb that turns one thing into another; “ka” is the particle of likeness; “ʿaṣf” is the dry matter of a grain plant, the husk and straw left once the grain is gone; and “maʾkūl” is a passive participle from the root ʾ-k-l, “eaten”.
Two things about the Arabic explain the spellings people type, which include “faja alahum ka asfim ma’qul” and “faja alahum ka asfim”. The words run together at “asfim” because ʿaṣfin ends in a tanwīn that assimilates into the mīm of maʾkūl when the two are read in sequence, so the ear hears one word where the script has two. The last word is maʾkūl with a kāf rather than a qāf; the stored transliteration of the verse reads “Faja ’alahum ka’asfim m’akool”, which is the same sounds written another way.
The line closes a five-verse account of an army that marched on Mecca, which the tradition places in the year of the Prophet ﷺ’s birth. It opens as a question: “Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the people of the elephant?” (105:1), then “Did he not turn their scheme astray?” (105:2), then “he sent against them flocks of birds” (105:3), “pelting them with stones of baked clay” (105:4), and the outcome in 105:5. The surah that follows reads as the second half of the same thought, naming Quraysh and “their familiar journeys of winter and summer” (106:2), then “let them worship the Lord of this House,” (106:3), the one “who fed them against hunger and gave them security from fear.” (106:4).
“ʿAṣf” occurs twice in the Qur’an, and the other place is a garden. Ar-Rahman lists among the gifts of God “and grain in its husks, and fragrant herbs.” (55:12), where the same word names the sheath around a living crop. Setting the two beside each other is the force of the image: what stands in a field as the covering of grain is also what lies on the threshing floor after the grain has been taken and the stalks trodden. The root carries wind as well. An ʿāṣif is a gale, as in “and the winds that rage in fury” (77:2) and “we subjected the raging wind” (21:81), and a gale is what drives the grain apart from the ʿaṣf.
The same shape is used elsewhere for peoples brought down. Al-A’la runs the identical verb into an identical simile for pasture: “then turned it to darkened stubble.” (87:5). Thamud “became like the dry stubble of a pen-builder” (54:31), ʿAd were left “as if they were the hollow trunks of fallen palms” (69:7), and in Ibrahim the deeds of those who deny are pictured as ash: “their deeds are like ashes scattered by a fierce wind on a stormy day” (14:18). Each takes something that had bulk and weight and shows what is left of it.
What “ʿaṣf maʾkūl” pictures exactly is read in more than one way by the commentators. Some take maʾkūl in its plain passive sense, fodder that livestock has eaten and passed, so the army is likened to what remains after straw has gone through an animal. Others read it as straw eaten into rather than eaten up, a stalk riddled by grubs until it crumbles at a touch. A third reading takes it as the chaff on a threshing floor once the grain has been removed and the rest trampled. All three are transmitted, they agree on what the image conveys, and the verse itself does not choose between them.
The word 105:2 gives to what the army intended is “kayd”, a scheme laid quietly, and its end here belongs to a pattern. The order given against the children of Israel draws the comment that “the scheming of those who deny leads only to ruin” (40:25); Badr is explained with “God weakens the schemes of those who deny” (8:18); At-Tariq answers “Indeed, they are scheming a scheme,” (86:15) with “and I too devise a plan.” (86:16); and the believers are told that if they are patient and mindful, “their scheming will not harm you in the least” (3:120). Al-Fil is that pattern told once, in five lines, about one road to Mecca.
📖 Source: Qur’an 105:1–5; 106:2–4; 55:12; 77:2; 21:81; 87:5; 54:31; 69:7; 14:18; 40:25; 8:18; 86:15–16; 3:120
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