Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 24 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:24

إِلَّآ أَن يَشَآءَ ٱللَّهُ ۚ وَٱذْكُر رَّبَّكَ إِذَا نَسِيتَ وَقُلْ عَسَىٰٓ أَن يَهْدِيَنِ رَبِّى لِأَقْرَبَ مِنْ هَـٰذَا رَشَدًا

“Except [when adding], "If Allāh wills." And remember your Lord when you forget [it] and say, "Perhaps my Lord will guide me to what is nearer than this to right conduct."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Forgetting, in Arabic, is leaving something lying on the ground when the camp moves on, and this ayah tells you to go back.

A reflection

The stick left in the grass

The word for forgetting has a scene behind it, and the lexicons preserve the call that went with it.

When a desert camp broke up and moved off, the Arabs would call out: look to your leavings. These were the small cheap things most likely to be left behind. A stick. A cup. A wooden pin. Each one had its own name, meaning a thing dropped and forgotten on the ground. A poet pictures a modest woman walking with her eyes down, as though searching for one she had lost.

So the root holds two ideas at once. The mind letting go of something it once held, and simply leaving a thing behind as you move.

And the most terrible use of the word in the Qur'an is Maryam in the pain of labour. She wished she had been a cast-off thing that nobody remembers (19:23).

Walk a showground on the morning after the fair. The lorries have gone, the ruts are drying, the grass is flattened in rings. And there is always one tent peg still in the ground, and a mug on a wall, and a child's hair ribbon.

So the instruction is not abstract. You have broken camp. Something of His is lying back there in the grass.

Go and get it.

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.