Translation / Interpretation / Caption Text / Source
Arabic translation:
(white text at top)
And He sent against them flights of birds striking them with stones of baked clay. Then did He make them like an empty field of stalks and straw (of which the corn) has been eaten up.
Translation by Yusuf Ali
(red text)
Resistance - resistance until liberation
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"Next morning Abrahah prepared to enter Mecca, but his special elephant, Mahmud, which was in the forefront, knelt down. It was beaten with iron bars, goaded, even scarified, but it would not get up. When they made it face south, north, or east, it would immediately start off, but as soon as they directed it towards Mecca, it knelt down. In the meantime swarms of birds appeared carrying stones in their beaks and claws and showered these on the troops. Whoever was hit would start disintegrating. According to Muhammad bin Ishaq and Ikrimah, this was smallpox, which was seen in Arabia for the first time in that year.
Source: Wikipedia
The Surat of the Elephant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Fil
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Curator's note:
This poster references the Surat (Arabic: chapter) of the Elephant. The intent of the publisher is to draw a parallel between the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Abyssinian army that besieged Mecca in 571 A.D. The central claim of the poster is that the Israeli army, though equipped with modern "elephants", i.e., tanks and armored personnel carriers, would suffer defeat not as a result of a matching, mechanized force but rather at the hands of thousands of lightly armed individual Amal partisans.
Artist / Designer / Photographer
Related links
Year
Circa 1982
Wellspring
Special Collection
Publisher
Language
Arabic
Credit/Provenance/Source
Published In
Duplicates
0
Status / Acquisition Goals
The PPPA has only the low resolution digital version of this poster featured
The PPPA is interested in acquiring an original copy of this poster via trade
Dimensions
50 x 69 cm