The Quran

Preface

وَإِلىٰ ثَمودَ أَخاهُم صالِحًا ۗ قالَ يا قَومِ اعبُدُوا اللَّهَ ما لَكُم مِن إِلٰهٍ غَيرُهُ ۖ قَد جاءَتكُم بَيِّنَةٌ مِن رَبِّكُم ۖ هٰذِهِ ناقَةُ اللَّهِ لَكُم آيَةً ۖ فَذَروها تَأكُل في أَرضِ اللَّهِ ۖ وَلا تَمَسّوها بِسوءٍ فَيَأخُذَكُم عَذابٌ أَليمٌ

Yusuf Ali

To the Thamūd people¹ (We sent) Ṣālih, one of their own brethren: He said: “O my people! worship God. ye have no other god but Him. Now hath come unto you a clear (Sign) from your Lord! This she-camel of God is a Sign unto you: So leave her to graze in God’s earth, and let her come to no harm, or ye shall be seized with a grievous punishment.²

The Thamūd people were the successors to the culture and civilisation of the ‘Ād people, for whom see n. 1040 and 7:65 above. They were cousins to the ‘Ād, apparently a younger branch of the same race. Their story also belongs to Arabian tradition, according to which their eponymous ancestor Thamūd was a son of 'Abir (a brother of Aram), the son of Sam, the son of Noah. Their seat was in the northwest corner of Arabia (Arabia Petraea), between Madman and Syria. It included both rocky country (hijr, 15:80), and the spacious fertile valley (Wadi) and plains country of Qura, which begins just north of the City of Medīna and was traversed by the Hijaz Railway. When the Prophet in the 9th year of the Hijrat led his expedition to Tabuk (about 400 miles north of Medīna) against the Roman forces, on a reported Roman invasion from Syria, he and his men came across the archaeological remains of Thamūd. The recently excavated rock city of Petra, near Ma'an, may go back to Thamūd, though its architecture has many features connecting it with Egyptian and Graeco-Roman culture overlaying what is called by European writers Nabataean culture. Who were the Nabataeans? They were an old Arab tribe which played a considerable part in history after they came into conflict with Antigonus 1 in 312 B.C. Their capital was Petra, but they extended their territory right up to the Euphrates. In 85 B.C. they were lords of Damascus under their king Haritha (Aretas of Roman history). For some time they were allies of the Roman Empire and held the Red Sea littoral. The Emperor Trajan reduced them and annexed their territory in A.C. 105. The Nabataeans succeeded Thamūd of Arabian tradition. Thamūd are mentioned by name in an inscription of the Assyrian King Sargon, dated 715 B.C., as a people of Eastern and Central Arabia (Encyclopedia, of Islam). See also Appendix 7 to S. 26. With the advance of material civilisation, Thamūd people became godless and arrogant, and were destroyed by an earthquake. Their prophet and warner was Ṣālih, and the crisis in their history is connected with the story of a wonderful shecamel: see next note.
The story of this wonderful she-camel, that was a sign Lo the Thamūd, is variously told in tradition. We need not follow the various versions in the traditional story. What we are told in the Qur-ān is: that (1) she was a Sign or Symbol, which the Prophet Ṣālih, used for a warning to the haughty oppressors of the poor; (2) there was scarcity of water, and the arrogant or privileged classes tried to prevent the access of the poor or their cattle to the springs, while Ṣālih intervened on their behalf (26:155, 54:28); (3) like water, pasture was considered a free gift of nature, in this spacious earth of God (7:73), but the arrogant ones tried to monopolise the pasture also; (4) this particular she-camel was made a test case (54:27) to see if the arrogant ones would come to reason; (5) the arrogant ones, instead of yielding to the reasonable rights of the people, hamstrung the poor shecamel and slew her, probably secretly (91:14, 54:29); the cup of their iniquities was full, and the Thamūd people were destroyed by a dreadful earthquake, which threw them prone on the ground and buried them with their houses and their fine buildings.