Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 101 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:101

ٱلَّذِينَ كَانَتْ أَعْيُنُهُمْ فِى غِطَآءٍ عَن ذِكْرِى وَكَانُوا۟ لَا يَسْتَطِيعُونَ سَمْعًا

“Those whose eyes had been within a cover [removed] from My remembrance,[801] and they were not able to hear.[802]”

Saheeh International

Essence

This 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.

A reflection

The other ten verses

Everybody knows the first ten verses of this chapter. Far fewer know that the same narration has a second form.

In Sahih Muslim, Abu Darda reports the Prophet saying that whoever memorises ten verses from the beginning of Surat al-Kahf is protected from the Dajjal.

And in the Sunan of Abu Dawud the same report appears, with a note that Abu Dawud adds himself. One transmitter from the same teacher gave it as: whoever memorises from the closing verses of Surat al-Kahf. Another gave it as: from the last of al-Kahf.

So one chain yields three forms: the first ten, the closing verses, the last of the surah. The narration is graded sound.

This verse is the first of the last ten.

So a reader who has carried the opening since childhood may never have noticed something. The other end of the chapter carries a report of the same protection.

And once you ask why, the content answers it.

The opening ten describe the Book, a warning, the young men in the cave, and the beginning of the wealth test. They are about holding on when the world looks overwhelming.

These ten describe something different and more interior. Eyes under a lid. An inability to hear. Patrons taken instead of the Owner. Effort lost while the person believed he was doing well.

The trial they answer is not an external terror. It is being confidently wrong.

A man carries ten verses in his chest for forty years and never once needs them in the way he imagined. He had pictured a confrontation. What they do instead is correct him, quietly, on perhaps nine ordinary mornings a year.

So if the first ten are armour, these are a mirror, and the reports place the same protection on both.

The chapter is read every Friday. It is worth asking, honestly, how often the reading reaches here.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.