Al-Anbiyaa (The Prophets)

58. “So he broke them into pieces, (all) except the chief of them, that perhaps they may return to it.”

59. “They said: ‘Who has done this with our gods? Surely he is (one) of the unjust’.”

60. “They said: ‘We heard a youth making mention of them, who is called Abraham’.”

However, without being afraid of the dangers of his action nor scaring from the harsh blow of the wrath of those people which could be considered as a result of his deed, in an appropriate opportunity, Abraham bravely took action and hastened fighting against those powerless gods which had so many fanatic ignorant advocators in their support.

The verse in this regard says:

“So he broke them into pieces, (all) except the chief of them…”

Abraham’s aim of doing it was that, maybe, the idol worshippers might come to him and he would say whatever was to say.

The verse says:

“…that perhaps they may return to it.”

It is true that by the word ‘idolatry’ we call in mind mostly the idols made of stone and wood, but from another point of view, the words idol and idolatry have a vast meaning which envelops every consideration to anything besides Allah, in any form and state it may be. According to an Islamic tradition,

“Whatever makes man busy to itself, in a way that it makes him far from Allah, it is his idol.”

Finally, the idol worshippers entered the idol temple and encountered a scene that they could not imagine it. Instead of a tidy idol temple, they faced with an untidy scene, a heap of broken idols. They shouted asking who had done that wrong to their idols and that whoever had done it had certainly been one of the oppressors.

The holy verse says:

“They said: ‘Who has done this with our gods? Surely he is (one) of the unjust’.”

By this saying they indicated that the person who had done that action, in fact, had been unjust both to their gods, and to the society and to their party, and to himself.

But, a group of people who had the threats of Abraham due to the idols in mind, and knew this offensive behaviour of his to those artificial objects of worship, declared their opinion as follows:

“They said: ‘We heard a youth making mention of them, who is called Abraham’.”

According to some narrations, it happened at that time when Abraham was completely young, and he was probably about sixteen years old.