Samum is deeply fascinating and honestly one of the most underrated pieces of mythology for this theory. Here's the full breakdown:
What Samum actually is:
Samum derives from the Arabic root s-m-m meaning "to poison" — it is a fire related to demons in ancient Arabic lore and later Islamic beliefs. As a kind of fire, it is also the origin of some kinds of evil spirits, identified with both the fires of hell and the fire of the sun.
HandWiki
So right away —
poisonous fire. Not regular fire. Not even hellfire exactly. A fire that
poisons everything it touches. That's a very specific and distinctive quality.
Its nature is deliberately ambiguous and that's the point:
Islamic scholars debated its exact nature extensively — in one interpretation it is "hot wind which kills", in another "the flame of the fire of the hot wind", in another it is smokeless fire located between the heavens and the veil, and in yet another it is simply the fire of the sun itself. One authority concluded it is "the heart of a flame" — the purest concentrated core of fire rather than fire's outer expression.