Al-Kahf الكهف

Makki · 110 ayat · 110 with pondering

• Ayah 1The surah that answers a trap opens not with the answer but with praise, and with one claim: nothing in this Book is bent.
• Ayah 2Straight, balanced and in charge, it warns of a severity kept at His own side and promises not a large reward but a beautiful one.
• Ayah 3Three words close the promise, and one of them is a word this surah later hands to a man who loses everything.
• Ayah 4A second warning is cut out of the first and aimed at one sentence, because of all the things people say, this is the gravest.
• Ayah 5Nothing is known about it and nothing was known by their fathers, and the horror here is placed in the saying, not the thought.
• Ayah 6A man is pictured following the footprints of people walking away from him, wearing himself out on their trail, and he is told to stop.
• Ayah 7Everything on the earth is called jewellery for the earth, and the reason given for the beauty is a test about who does best.
• Ayah 8The jewellery of the previous ayah comes off in this one, and the word chosen is the one used of a blade that cuts clean.
• Ayah 9The famous story opens with a question that takes the marvel out of it before a single detail is given.
• Ayah 10The first thing the surah tells us about them is not their number or their names but the eleven words they said on going in.
• Ayah 11They asked for mercy and for a way forward, and the first thing He did was switch off their hearing.
• Ayah 12The verb used for waking them is the verb used for raising the dead, and the reason given is a dispute about how long.
• Ayah 13Two men were sent north to fetch this story, and here the Teller takes it back, with a declared standard: in truth.
• Ayah 14Before they could say one sentence out loud, something had to be tied inside them so that it would not come undone.
• Ayah 15The young men do not refute their town, but ask it one question nobody in it can answer.
• Ayah 16Six ayat after they prayed for two things, the same two things come back as a promise, in almost the same words.
• Ayah 17The sun's track and the guidance of a heart are named in one breath, as two things moved by the same hand.
• Ayah 18The most famous scene in the surah ends with the only sentence nobody quotes: you would have run.
• Ayah 19The first words after three centuries are a wrong guess about the time, and the second are an order for lunch.
• Ayah 20Two threats are named, and the sentence about never succeeding is attached to the second one, not the stones.
• Ayah 21The sign arrived in the middle of an argument about whether the dead are raised, and four words interrupt the argument.
• Ayah 22The surah lists the guesses about how many they were, calls the guessing a thrown stone, and forbids the argument.
• Ayah 23The whole surah arrived late because one clause was left off one sentence, and here is the sentence.
• Ayah 24Forgetting, in Arabic, is leaving something lying on the ground when the camp moves on, and this ayah tells you to go back.
• Ayah 25After fifteen ayat of refusing figures the surah gives one, and in the next breath hands it back.
• Ayah 26The word for the unseen means the sun after it has set: still there, still shining, hidden only from your eyes.
• Ayah 27The verb for reciting means a weaned kid trotting behind its mother, and the word for refuge is the niche cut in a grave wall.
• Ayah 28The leading men of a tribe were called its faces, and the poor men in the circle wanted a different Face.
• Ayah 29Believe or do not: words that sound like a free choice, read by every commentary as a warning, with the fire already in store.
• Ayah 30Work done well sits on a register Someone else keeps, and the verb for losing it almost never appears without a no in front.
• Ayah 31The reward is listed item by item, and one item lands on the exact patch of forearm you rinse before every prayer.
• Ayah 32Before the owner says one word about what he has, the verse has already named who gave it and who planted the ring of palms.
• Ayah 33Two gardens that never once short-changed him, and a river split open through the middle of them by a hand that was not his.
• Ayah 34He answers a man talking about God by reading out an inventory, in a word whose root means a turban unwound.
• Ayah 35He crosses into his own garden with the verdict already written into the middle of the sentence, then says what nobody can know.
• Ayah 36He denies the Hour, then in the same breath names the better place of turning he expects to be given at it.
• Ayah 37Instead of arguing about the estate, the poor man asks the owner what he is made of: dust, then a drop.
• Ayah 38Standing inside another man's garden with nothing of his own, he answers an inventory with a creed, and ends on the number one.
• Ayah 39The repair was available at the gate and cost nothing: a word about whose will it is, and a word about where strength comes from.
• Ayah 40He answers an absolute certainty with the word perhaps, and the only thing he names is a reckoning coming down out of the sky.
• Ayah 41Nothing is destroyed here: the water goes down, stays exactly where it is, and becomes something you will never be able to look for.
• Ayah 42The vine lies across its own frames, and the only thing he can think about is the money he put in.
• Ayah 43Both halves of his boast are removed by name, and the word for his clan means a part split off from the whole.
• Ayah 44The parable ends on a word for a heel: not what a thing is, but what walks along behind it.
• Ayah 45The word for the withered stubble is the verb that named a famous man of Makkah, for breaking bread into broth in a famine.
• Ayah 46Wealth and children are called adornment, in a word whose picture is the earth decked in new grass after rain, for one season.
• Ayah 47The word for the earth laid bare also names open ground with no hollow to hide in, and a champion stepping out of the line.
• Ayah 48Presented in ranks, in a word whose root is levelness: one line, with nobody ahead of anybody and nobody behind.
• Ayah 49The Book is described with the verb for abandoning, negated: it leaves nothing behind, and neither the small nor the great gets lost.
• Ayah 50Wretched is the exchange, in a word picturing a signet melted down and recast as a plain band: the same gold, the seal gone.
• Ayah 51The helpers He does not need are named with the word for the upper arm, where a man's strength sits.
• Ayah 52He calls them My partners, using their own word for them, and then lets them be called in front of everybody.
• Ayah 53Their certainty is named with the word the man in the garden used for his guess, taken to the other end of its range.
• Ayah 54Both Sahihs record the Prophet applying this verse to somebody in his own household who had just said something theologically correct.
• Ayah 55The commentaries say it was never a lack of clarity: what stopped them was a demand to be shown the punishment face to face.
• Ayah 56The word for a warner pictures a scout running in from the desert, tearing off his garment and waving it above his head.
• Ayah 57One Companion compared the covering on these hearts to a quiver: the arrows are inside, and nothing else is getting in.
• Ayah 58The last word is not a hiding place but a refuge where you actually get away, and the verse says there is none.
• Ayah 59The verb for their destruction has a sandgrouse under it, flinging itself away from the falcon into the drop between two mountains.
• Ayah 60The word for the age he would travel is a saddlebag tied behind the rider, holding whatever was packed into it.
• Ayah 61The word for the fish's tunnel and the word for a mirage come from one root, in a surah about false appearances.
• Ayah 62The word for his fatigue belongs to a family of planted spears and raised waymarks: tiredness as a stone set up in the ground.
• Ayah 63He did not forget the fish; he says he was made to forget the mentioning of it, which is a different loss entirely.
• Ayah 64In Arabic, tracking footprints and telling a story are the same root, which is why going back is how this journey arrives.
• Ayah 65Four phrases describe the most famous teacher in the surah, and three of them are possessives belonging to somebody else.
• Ayah 66He does not ask for a lesson but for permission to walk behind a man, with the teaching named as the reason.
• Ayah 67The word for being able comes from the root of obedience: a mount that answers the lightest touch of the rein.
• Ayah 68A bird dipped its beak in the sea, and the teacher said that was the share both their knowledges took from Allah's.
• Ayah 69The word he uses for disobedience pictures a young camel that will not follow the mother who feeds it.
• Ayah 70The condition has its own ending written into it: do not ask, until I bring the mention of it into being for you.
• Ayah 71A ship is named in Arabic for planing the face of the water, and the narration says he opened it with an adze.
• Ayah 72He says the same sentence again, word for word, and adds nothing to it at all.
• Ayah 73The word for burdening pictures a she-camel so long in stride that, as you lead her, she comes right up on you.
• Ayah 74The word Musa chooses for what was done means a thing the heart cannot place: a face you cannot recognise.
• Ayah 75One word has been added to the sentence he said before, and the commentaries say that word is the whole of the rebuke.
• Ayah 76He hands the other man the ground to dismiss him, and names the term himself before anybody asks.
• Ayah 77The only time the Qur'an uses the verb for taking a guest in, it is being refused, by one town, to two travellers.
• Ayah 78He does not promise an explanation but an outcome, in a word whose picture is milk left to thicken.
• Ayah 79The word for the poor men who owned the boat shares a root with the rudder that stops a ship lurching.
• Ayah 80The word for what he would have brought on them pictures a flood coming down with more water than its bed can hold.
• Ayah 81Nearer in mercy uses the word for the last night's march, when thirsty camels stop grazing because the water is close.
• Ayah 82The word for the treasure means dates trodden down into a basket until it is packed tight and sewn shut.
• Ayah 83The root of his title is the rope that couples two ploughing bulls, so that neither can go its own way.
• Ayah 84Every verb in this verse is Allah's, and the word for what the man was given is, in the lexicons, a climbing rope.
• Ayah 85Given a rope to everything, he picked up one rope and walked.
• Ayah 86The verb is he found it, which the lexicons use for he saw: a report of what a traveller at a western shore perceived.
• Ayah 87The first sentence he speaks with absolute power puts a ceiling on his own half of it.
• Ayah 88The conqueror names the believer's real pay and it is not his to give, so all he offers is a lighter load.
• Ayah 89The joining word changed from and so to then, and that one syllable is a man leaving a finished success.
• Ayah 90The same We that gave him a way to everything says, of these people, that it made them no screen at all.
• Ayah 91The man who had looked at both ends of the world is told, in one line, that he had been looked at from the inside.
• Ayah 92The third journey of a man who had been to both ends of the world goes to the middle.
• Ayah 93The people whose request was granted are the only ones in the chapter described as unable to make themselves understood.
• Ayah 94The people who could barely be understood name the problem, offer to pay for it, and propose the remedy, in one sentence.
• Ayah 95Offered a fee, he repeats the verb Allah used of him eleven verses earlier and hands the credit back in the same breath.
• Ayah 96Three instructions, each one word long, and the longest description of making anything in the Qur'an.
• Ayah 97The verse uses a lighter verb for climbing over and the full one for boring through, because one was the easier task.
• Ayah 98On the day his greatest work was finished he said my Lord three times and announced that the work would be levelled.
• Ayah 99The verb for leaving them is the one the Arabs used of an ostrich's egg abandoned in open desert.
• Ayah 100The root of displayed is a stick laid across the mouth of a vessel: something set crosswise so nothing gets past it.
• Ayah 101This verse begins the last ten of Al-Kahf, and one sound narration carries the Dajjal protection from the closing verses rather than the opening ones.
• Ayah 102The patrons they took instead of Him are called, in the same sentence, My servants.
• Ayah 103The superlative is not the greatest losers; it is the greatest losers in respect of deeds, which means the deeds were there.
• Ayah 104The root behind doing well also gives the word for a polished outside kept up over a hollow inside.
• Ayah 105Both Sahihs record the Prophet reciting this verse about a large, heavy man who would not weigh a gnat's wing.
• Ayah 106The lexicons' picture for mockery is a mirage that makes fools of a party of riders, and the joke turns out to be on them.
• Ayah 107The word for their lodging is the one used five verses earlier for Hell, and a narration-based commentary reads it as hospitality.
• Ayah 108A narration-based commentary says the clause exists because a reader would otherwise assume that staying somewhere forever must end in weariness.
• Ayah 109The word for ink and the word for the supplement share one root, which the lexicons picture as ink that keeps a pen writing.
• Ayah 110A verse about the infinity of His words is followed immediately by a man instructed to say that he is only a man.