Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 14 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:14

وَرَبَطْنَا عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمْ إِذْ قَامُوا۟ فَقَالُوا۟ رَبُّنَا رَبُّ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ لَن نَّدْعُوَا۟ مِن دُونِهِۦٓ إِلَـٰهًا ۖ لَّقَدْ قُلْنَآ إِذًا شَطَطًا

“And We bound [i.e., made firm] their hearts when they stood up and said, "Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth. Never will we invoke besides Him any deity. We would have certainly spoken, then, an excessive transgression.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Before they could say one sentence out loud, something had to be tied inside them so that it would not come undone.

A reflection

Your gods are themselves owned

One commentary puts their argument in a single move. Our Lord is the owner of the heavens and the earth and of everything in them. Your gods are owned things. And it is not permissible for us to leave worshipping the Owner in order to worship what is owned.

The word they used for Lord has an old picture behind it. A leather skin for butter was rubbed with a thick fruit syrup. The coating sealed it and sweetened it, so the butter neither seeped away nor spoiled. An untreated skin ruined whatever was poured into it. The same verb was used of a father raising a child, and of a man tending an estate until it is in good order. So a Lord owns, is obeyed, and keeps setting right what is in His care.

And the idols were things that had themselves been treated, carved, raised, maintained.

There is a man who hires the same horse from a livery every Saturday and has done for eleven years. He knows which rein she prefers and how she takes a gate. In all those years he has not once thought about whose horse she is, and that is not callousness. The animal is in front of him and the owner is not.

That is the whole mechanism, and pride lives in it. We attach to what is present and fund our self-importance from it, without ever asking who the present thing belongs to.

They saw it, standing in front of a king, and said it out loud.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.