Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 32 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:32

۞ وَٱضْرِبْ لَهُم مَّثَلًا رَّجُلَيْنِ جَعَلْنَا لِأَحَدِهِمَا جَنَّتَيْنِ مِنْ أَعْنَـٰبٍ وَحَفَفْنَـٰهُمَا بِنَخْلٍ وَجَعَلْنَا بَيْنَهُمَا زَرْعًا

“And present to them an example of two men: We granted to one of them two gardens of grapevines, and We bordered them with palm trees and placed between them [fields of] crops.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Before the owner says one word about what he has, the verse has already named who gave it and who planted the ring of palms.

A reflection

We gave. He did not.

Count the verbs and notice who owns them. We gave. We ringed. We placed. Three times in one sentence, and the man who will shortly announce how much he has is grammatically the indirect object. Something was done for him. He has not acted yet.

The ayah has settled the argument before the argument starts.

There is a word in it that makes the point on its own. Zarʿ is usually translated crops, and we hear a farmer sowing. The lexicons are more careful. The root is about making a thing grow and increase. It names not the hand that casts the seed, but the swelling that follows, which no hand can perform. Hence the old prayer for a child, that Allah make him grow and set him right, using this same root.

So the one part of the operation that is genuinely impossible for a human being is the part the word is named after.

Every apple tree in an old orchard is really two trees. A rootstock, chosen long ago by somebody for how it handles wet ground and how tall it keeps the tree. And a scion, grafted onto it, chosen for the fruit. The owner today chose neither. He walks between them in October with a basket, saying my trees. Both decisions that made them were taken by hands whose names have gone out of the family.

This is where pride is strangest. We are most possessive about exactly the things we did least. The intelligence, the health, the seasons, the fact that water falls out of the sky at all. Nobody boasts about what they genuinely built, because they remember how it felt. We boast about what arrived.

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.