Black storm-clouds drifted over him, and a voice called out from within: “Choose!” He pointed to one of them—a pitch-black cloud—whereupon the voice cried: “Take it, a cloud of ashes, a suffocating dust; let it leave not a single soul of ʿĀd alive.”

He said, “I was informed that the wind loosed against them was no more than what could pass through the opening of this very ring—yet they all perished.”

Abū Wāʾil remarked, “He spoke the truth. Whenever men or women sent someone as their envoy, they would say, ‘Do not be like the envoy of ʿĀd.’”

Al-Tirmidhī has transmitted this ḥadīth, through ʿAbd b. Ḥumayd from Zayd b. al-Hubāb. Al-Nasāʾī reports it as well, through Sallām Abū al-Mundhir from ʿĀṣim b. Bahdalah, and Ibn Mājah relates it by the same chain. A number of Qur’ānic commentators—such as Ibn Jarīr and others—cite this narration in their exegesis of the relevant verses.

It is possible that this account concerns the destruction of the later ʿĀd, for Ibn Isḥāq and others mention Mecca in the story, and Mecca was not built until after Abraham the Friend, peace be upon him, settled Hājar and his son Ishmael there and the tribe of Jurhum came to reside with them, as will be detailed. The earlier ʿĀd preceded Abraham. The narrative also mentions Muʿāwiya b. Bakr and his poetry, whose diction belongs to a period far later than the first ʿĀd; it bears no resemblance to the language of the ancients. In addition, it speaks of sparks of fire within that cloud, whereas the first ʿĀd were destroyed by a piercing, icy wind.

Ibn Masʿūd, Ibn ʿAbbās, and many leading Successors said that the wind was bitterly cold and violently raging: “He subjected it to them for seven nights and eight days, unceasing” (al-Ḥāqqah 69:7)—that is, full and consecutive. Some said its first day was a Friday; others said a Wednesday: “And you would see the people therein fallen, as though they were trunks of hollow palm-trees” (al-Ḥāqqah 69:7). He likened them to headless palm stumps because the wind would seize one of them, lift him aloft, then hurl him down on the crown of his head, crushing him so that he remained a body without a head. Allah also says: “Indeed, We unleashed upon them a screaming wind on a day of persistent misfortune, plucking the people away as though they were trunks of uprooted palm-trees” (al-Qamar 54:19–20).

Whoever claims that the ‘persistent day of misfortune’ was Wednesday and therefore regards Wednesday as inauspicious has erred and contradicted the Qur’an, for Allah says elsewhere: “So We sent upon them a screaming wind during days of ill fortune” (Fussilat 41:16). It is well known that those were eight consecutive days; were the days themselves inherently ill-omened, then all seven days encompassed within those eight would have been inauspicious—and this