The Qur’an and Communal Memory: Q. 85 and the Martyrs of Najrān

Sura 85 has attracted scholarly attention for the past two centuries due to its supposed reference to the massacre of the Christians of Najrān in 523 ce. Following the massacre, Byzantium and Christian Ethiopia (i.e. the Kingdom of Aksum) took the initiative to reaffirm their hegemony in southern Arabia: an Ethiopian army invaded Yemen and installed a Christian ruler, and the Jewish king of Yemen who was responsible for the persecution of the Christians was deposed and supposedly committed suicide. The earliest layers of the Islamic tradition saw Sura 85 as commentary on this massacre. However, this connection would prove problematic to the later Islamic tradition, and a concerted attempt was made to downplay, if not to obliterate it. Alternative readings were proposed, including that Q. 85 referred to the Biblical story of Daniel 3, specifically to the three youths who survived the fire. Most commentators, though, linked Sura 85 to what is certainly an apocryphal story of an anonymous monotheistic youth who opposed a similarly anonymous polytheistic king and was killed by fire. For its part, the Euro-American tradition has, overall, denied the existence of any historical reference in Sura 85 and claimed that the torture by fire described in this sura is instead a reference to Hell. This article reviews the massive literature on this sura and proposes that the Najran martyrs remain the most plausible referent.