Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 3 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:3

مَّـٰكِثِينَ فِيهِ أَبَدًا

“In which they will remain forever”

Saheeh International

Essence

Three words close the promise, and one of them is a word this surah later hands to a man who loses everything.

A reflection

A word that takes no plural

The lexicons join two ideas in this root, and the pairing is strange until you look at it. One is long duration. The other is wildness. To settle in a place and never leave it uses this root. Wild animals were named from it, said to be called that for their long lives. A deserted camp that the beasts had taken over was described with it. And a calamity, or a word so odd that people never stopped repeating it, took the same form.

Then the grammarians make a precise observation. Ordinary time can be divided. You can take a stretch of years and halve it, and halve it again. This word names time that cannot be cut into parts, which is why it should have no plural. There is no second one of these to add to the first.

That is harder to hold in the head than it sounds, because every long thing we have ever measured was measured by counting its parts.

A dendrochronologist works outward in from the bark, counting rings. Wide years, narrow years, a scar where a branch broke in a storm two centuries before anyone alive. The counting is beautiful and it is finite. At the centre is the pith, and there the method simply stops. Not because the tree began at a date she cannot read, but because there are no more parts to count.

Every promise we are used to is a stretch of countable years. This one is not.

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.