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© The Islamic Foundation. 2008 / 1429H
ISBN 9780860374916
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
MUSLIM CHILDREN’S LIBRARY
Miraculous Happenings in “The Year of the Elephant”
Author: Mehded Maryam Sinclair
Illustrator: Ramendranath Sarkar
Cover/Book design & Layout: Nasir Cadir
Coordinator: Anwar Cara
Published by
THE ISLAMIC FOUNDATION
Markfield Conference Centre
Ratby Lane, Markfield
Leicestershire, LE67 9SY, United Kingdom
T: +44 (01530) 244 944 F: +44 (01530) 244 946
Quran House, PO Box 30611, Nairobi, Kenya
PMB 3193, Kano, Nigeria
Distributed by: Kube Publishing Ltd.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sinclair, Mehded Maryam
Miraculous happenings in the year of the elephant
1. Legends, Islamic - Juvenile literature
I. Title II. Islamic Foundation (Great Britain)
297.1’8
ISBN-13: 9780860374916
Printed by Proost International Book Production, Belgium
ON a steamy-hot day in the Yemen of old a hundred slaves
dressed in nothing but tattered rags wrapped around their
waists heaved and hauled, hammered and hewed tons of
marble and stone for their master, the vice-regent Abrahah.
They worked inside an enormous cloud of rising white dust,
dust that clung to their skins, piled up in the hollows of
their ears, ringed their eyes and settled in their
hair and their beards. They scurried here
and there, lugging marble slabs, grinding
them into shape for corners and stairs,
sanding them smooth. The ring of mallets
on chisels stabbed the air; now and then
one of them coughed or sneezed
the dust out of his nose.
The lean, mean
Abrahah came in
his swirling black
robes and towered
over them to inspect, like a black ant
wandering amid a pile of sugar cubes.
He came only long enough to gloat, and
then returned to his chamber of thick
carpets and clean air.
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Back in the quiet of his chamber, he brushed a bit of the
chalky marble dust from his robe and pored over the
drawings of the new cathedral. He examined bits of ebony-
wood and ivory.
“Yes, these will do…use them for the pulpits and benches in
the main chamber.”
He closed a deal for the purchase of great marble slabs
salvaged from one of the palaces of the Queen of Sheba.
“In the whole wide world there’s not a single building as great
as this,” he boasted. “When the word gets out, pilgrims will
come here instead of to Makkah. Why make a pilgrimage to
that silly pile of stones they call the Ka‘ba?”
His bony hand closed around a goblet of wine and he drank
long and greedily. “And when they come, they’ll buy and sell,
and I will get even richer from all their trade! The Quraysh
of the Hollow will fly away like a leaf in the wind. Their city
will be deserted, the Ka‘ba will melt back into the sand and be
forgotten.”
Abrahah flung himself down on his brocade sofa and stuffed
a handful of black grapes into his mouth. “Bring me Unays,
the elephant trainer!”
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