 Okay so I want to look at elephants in Islam because on the whole as we'll see at this conference there's a tendency to look at elephants very much either in the Hindu Buddhist tradition or sometimes in the Western tradition but Islam rather gets left out and elephants are there then from the very beginning because one of the suras of the Quran is I'll feel the elephants not the elephants as I said in my abstract isn't correct and although this is a short sura and therefore it comes towards the end of the Quran it's almost certainly an early revelation to the Prophet from the time of his Meccan teaching so the crucial verse is that first one have you not seen how thy Lord did with the men of the elephant and because you're not allowed to picture living beings in strict Islam you can use calligraphy and this is the whole of sura 105 in the form of an elephant now the usual interpretation of this cryptic sentence or scriptic verse is that this it refers to an attack by Christian ruler of Yemen to tear down the Kaaba in Mecca the center of worship of Islam and according to the story the elephant probably followed by a number of other elephants refused to advance on Mecca now on top of that this invasion or failed invasion allegedly happened in the year of the birth of the Prophet or more exactly the Prophet was in his mother's womb at the time of the invasion now the problem with this in historical terms is that Abraha died around 554 CE and there are no elephants mentioned in the one inscription the one Himmariite hymnorite sorry inscription which might refer to this nevertheless the story of Abraha and the elephants is repeated endlessly in this is children's stories it's on the internet absolutely everywhere and it's generally believed by Muslims to be a correct relation of what what the Prophet was talking of what the revelation was about in the Quran so the elephant from this is mighty the the birth of the Prophet in the year of the elephant is an omen of success but at the same time the elephants are the animals of the infidel who are determined to root out Islam right so the elephant in Islam is born under an ambiguity both positive and negative and there's a fascinating story rather later of an Islamic general who has defeated in the Persian Afghan lands a enemies with elephants captured the elephants but refuses to integrate them into his own forces and he cites Abraha's story as the reason why Muslims should not have war elephants and this is a fascinating image which I found on the internet it's a 17th or 18th century illustration of Abraha's story as told by Adamiri and you can see that the the the way it's been done is actually quite a long way away from the story itself because the elephants are circling the Kaaba they're actually threatening and circling that the holy center of Islam this is a very negative image in many ways and it's reinforced then by the fact that early Muslim campaigns the Muslims are on horses and camels but they come up against enemies who are fielding war elephants especially Persians and Indians and this is a Armenian miniature of the war elephants that the Sasanian dynasty of Persia fielded against them the Parthian dynasty had not used war elephants but with the movement from the Parthian to the Sasanians in the third century of the common era there is a return of the war elephants in Persia now the other thing which makes the elephant gives the elephant a bad name so to speak in Islam is the fact that it becomes unclean meat the Quran itself only forbids pork blood and meat which is not killed in the in prescribed way but fairly quickly Sharia law builds up a whole series of interdicts on eating meat either because it's completely forbidden or in the case of the elephant and other meats because it is repulsive or unbecoming my crew within the five-fold system of Islam and exactly why the elephant should have fallen into this category is not entirely clear no that this is very different from the Hindu Buddhist idea that the elephant is too sacred to eat here in the Islamic tradition the elephant is too disgusting to eat okay the end result is the same you don't eat elephant but the reasons for it are completely different now one possibility is that because the elephant is seen as related to the pig by Metamorphosis this is what al-Jahiz says I don't know what this means Metamorphosis is one of these rather tricky words it's also suggested that it's a hairless or near hairless animal like the pig again but the usual thing you'll find all over the internet and interestingly modern Muslims are constantly asking for a fatwa why can't I eat elephant why are they asking this question I just don't know but all over the internet you've got the tower which are answering saying can't eat elephant because the elephant has tusks which are equivalent to fangs and you can't eat carnivores and therefore you can't eat elephant given that the elephant is a herb before this is a really peculiar kind of argument but it's reinforced by the idea of the elephant is a fighting animal not a peaceful flight animal like most herbivores and something which I haven't put here I've only discovered literally just before coming here is that some Ulama in East Africa say that the elephant does not chew the cud and therefore is to be assimilated to unclean meat this is a very interesting book about this unfortunately in German but and although it's meant to be about the slaughtering of animals in fact there's a lot in this book about which meats are unclean to Muslims and which Muslims and why now there are some exceptions made we spoke earlier before the break about medical treatises and the same is true in Islam there are medical treatises which recommend bits of the elephant but note that these are penned by Christian Arabs right finally discovered this after quite a bit of searching that although these were widely read by Muslims and written within an Islamic framework they're actually written by Christians this is the manafi al Haywan at the time of the Baghdad Caliphate I couldn't get the internet to let me download the picture of the elephant to give you another one now this begins to change in Islam arguably with the Persian cultural revival one of the great paradoxes of Islam is that the Arab Muslims conquered the Persians militarily but the Persians then conquered the Arab culturally and it's this kind of great reversal of fortunes which occurs really with the foundation of the Abbasid Caliphate from 750 of the common era which leads to the first return of the elephant the elephant in Persian culture was extremely important and revered and so elephants now become mounts but note they don't become animals of war they just become symbols of power and strength and being important this is one of the most famous of these elephants because it was given to Frederick II Horan Staufen the ruler of Sicily and was used in the capture of Cremona in Italy note that North Europeans and how much idea what an elephant really looked like and so we have this rather strange depiction in Matthew Paris's text another thing which happens in the Abbasid period is the rise of ivory carving early Islam hardly carves an ivory at all and here actually Persia had no real tradition either for reasons which I can't understand so it's essentially Western and Indian traditions which lead to this flowering of carving now note that of course carving very quickly tends to flout the Sharia ban on the depiction of living beings this is a ban which has been much flouted in Islamic history but it's also something which is then used as a stick with which to beat people who've done this this is an example from our under loose from Iberia and you can see there's plenty in this ivory carving there's plenty of living beings of various kinds also the opposite Kali fates is a huge flowering of science it's often said this is a recovery of Greek science this is actually very misleading what it is is a kind of synthesis of European science of Egyptian science of Indian science anything that the first Muslims get at the hands-on was translated and was used to build up that extraordinary flowering of early Islamic science and within that we have the character this the fascinating character of Jerhiz who writes the first great treatise on eleph on animals sorry the seven volume book of animals and who really tried to base this on reality he took great pleasure in telling Aristotle he was wrong and in inspecting elephants which have been sent to Iraq and seeing for himself what they were really like and turning to Indian sources to find out about elephants and this is really quite a comprehensive and encyclopedic although he does actually repeat some of the mistakes of Aristotle and it's by no means a modern thing again this is Jerhiz's book of animals but the giraffe is often used as an illustration and I couldn't find the elephant one there are many many additions of Jerhiz's work now one of the most perplexing things I've found in which I really don't understand is that with the eruption of Central Asian Turks into Islam either as Mamluks war slaves or as rulers what we actually get is something which is totally unexpected you the Turks come from horse country you'd expect them to reject the elephant in the name of the horse in fact what they do is they become culturally more Persian than the Persians and they made the crucial further step that they now adopt the elephant as an animal of war notes that there are some exceptions to this and the great the second great encyclopedic compendium on animals of Muhammad at Damiri a 14th century Mamluks Egypt although he's a favourable to the elephant in some ways that there are very clear signs in what he writes that the elephant is somehow not quite Islamic and particularly he notes that the Indians worship it or that the Indians magnify it too much and there's a distinct hint that he's saying that that the elephant is a source of polytheism the source of worshiping more than one God this is his great book which is again gone into many additions now in India we have another Mamluk state Delhi Sultanate and here elephants are definitely adopted on large scale and the argument is that the Delhi Sultanate acts on controlling both fluxes of horses and fluxes of elephants in order to maintain its power the Mongols reject elephants initially they slaughter them they refuse to have anything to do with them and yet this magic of the elephant over time takes over and Timur takes a series of elephants from Delhi when he captures the town 1398 this is the Delhi Sultan fighting off Timur in early modern times then the elephant reaches its prominence in Islam and this is largely due to the Mughal dynasty which we've already had mentioned in various other presentations and perhaps above all to Akbar the great the very long-lived Mughal emperor was also of course extraordinarily controversial because he's seen as someone who betrayed Islam and who tried to create a new religion which would be a kind of synthesis of Hinduism and Islam so his reputation is both great but also murky now it's interesting that also this is a period of technological change in which firearms are being adopted much more widely and so although we see that Akbar uses elephants a great deal in his army they're increasingly used in a different way because if you try and use them as frontline troops as tanks as they used to be used they simply stampede we heard about the fireworks which make them nervous well you can imagine what a huge great cannon is going to do if it's fired straight at them right so elephants tend to stampede to turn back on their own troops to destroy their own infantry and for this reason for all the razzmatazz about Mughal armies the reality is that you're using more and more female elephants and you're using them more and more to carry baggage and to carry cannon to pull cannon behind the lines so they are used less and less act in fact as offensive this is a fascinating picture you probably can't see it terribly well but the elephants here are pushing you've got oxen or bullocks which are pulling these huge cannons and the elephants are helping along behind again interestingly behind at the same time that under the Mughals they definitely are extraordinarily important symbols of power and majesty they're a favorite subject of painting that was paintings against the Sharia ban on the picturing of living beings although we get lots and lots of miniature paintings at this time they're also used in animal fights animal fights again are banned by the Sharia so there's a whole series of rather unislamic things which are beginning to happen in this Mughal dynasty as an example of an elephant fight I think this is actually in Rajasthan so it's in an area which is under rather light Mughal control from India then elephants are exported to the other two great gunpowder empires the Ottomans and the Sakha vids and in Michael second name argues that he that they there's a real spread of symbolic capital in this but no they're not coming as war elephants the only known time that the Ottoman Sultan takes elephants on campaign he takes four of them somewhere into the steps and it's very unimportant and marginal so they are simply accepted into menageries they're impressed Western visitors amongst others as to the power of the Sakha vids and Ottoman emperors this is an elephant portrayed in the text of the time I'm not exactly sure what this text is but it's quite interesting the way in which it's portrayed it is very much a dark and threatening picture Southeast Asia then which has its own wild elephants we have a flowering two with a fascination with the Mughals the Mughal model is is taken on board by Southeast Asian rulers particularly in Acha and Nusmatra at this time but we also see elements of Hindu Buddhism remaining the fascination with white or so-called white elephants the fascination with elephants of more than two tusks all of this shows that there's an underlying non-Islamic or pre-Islamic element here where you don't get wild elephants as in Java they're imported and they're used entirely as a source of power but not of fighting this is a scene in the north coast of Java where the local ruler is welcoming thank you the Dutch in the early 17th century finally then in modern times I think what we're getting is a return to a more negative view of elephants in Islam and I think this is partly because elephants are ascribed at all sorts of transgressions of Islamic law however some radical Muslims suggest that the verse in the Quran that I cited right at the very beginning is not to do with Yemen which because it's counterintuitive that you could march elephants from Yemen up to Mecca and it's much more likely that this is actually about Petra about the Jordanian today the Jordanian city of Petra where we have these famous capitals discovered in 1921 and it's probably not about an attack on the Muslims it's probably about something that happened to the people in Petra and it's another story completely but this may or may not be true the verse in the Quran is extremely cryptic in the Southeast Asian context we find elephants disappearing notably in Ache at a time when Hadrami Arabs are bringing in a much more Sharia minded kind of idea for instance a fatwa comes from Mecca that you can't have women rulers Ache had had four women rulers in a row but the Shafi authorities in Mecca say that's not right and I think there is a real sense I mean this side this is circumstantial I don't have any evidence but there's a sense that this Sharia minded reform going on leads to the marginalization of elephants and they disappear completely from court and city by the early 19th century and fascinatingly it's the Dutch army which reintroduces tamed elephants later in the 19th century in contrast in Java we would get a very syncretic Islam great mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism elephants continue as royal symbols this is a modern artistic depiction but it's interesting that the elephant has been kept as a sign of Yogyakarta the Sultan of Yogyakarta's power. In South Asia I find interesting hints Muslim rebels in 1857 against the British compare the British to Abraha and to his elephants and Kipling the father of Rudyard Kipling makes this affirmation although I don't know what it's based on that the elephant is more of a Hindu animal and the horse the more of a Muslim animal of course this is at a time when under British rule religions becoming more and more of an identity marker in South Asia. Here are the two Kiplings Perifis. John Lockwood's book on popular book on animals in India is a very interesting read but one's never quite sure how much to trust it and finally there is the barrier to conversion or perhaps one should say really the the barrier to ortho-practice in Islam of eating elephant meat we know that there are peoples in Southeast Asia who eat it and who it said this constitutes a barrier to their becoming Muslim but this is probably great in Africa and I'd love it if the Africanist amongst you could tell me who eats elephant who doesn't to what extent elephant eating may or may not be an obstacle to either converting or to the ortho-practice of Islam this is elephant meat being dried in equatorial Africa where most of the elephant meat is consumed today is in the Congo sort of area you try it into a kind of built-on keeps extremely well so in conclusion then I think the Islamic side of elephants is not going to look that very much and I think there is actually quite a strong Islamic bias against elephants despite the positive views despite the Mughal Empire I think that they are seen as animals of hostile infidels the animals prohibited activities of Haram activities and in particular of eating thank you