Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 33 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:33

كِلْتَا ٱلْجَنَّتَيْنِ ءَاتَتْ أُكُلَهَا وَلَمْ تَظْلِم مِّنْهُ شَيْـًٔا ۚ وَفَجَّرْنَا خِلَـٰلَهُمَا نَهَرًا

“Each of the two gardens produced its fruit and did not fall short thereof in anything. And We caused to gush forth within them a river.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Two gardens that never once short-changed him, and a river split open through the middle of them by a hand that was not his.

A reflection

Somebody split the ground open for him

The verb here is violent, and we have smoothed it over by translating it as caused to flow. The lexicons give this root as splitting open wide. Breaching a dam so that the water bursts through. Springs forcing their way out. The same root names the dawn, because the night is split open by the light.

So the sentence is: We broke the ground open and sent water through the middle of his estate.

A village once sank four boreholes and hit nothing. Dry chalk, then dry chalk, then a seam that gave up a trickle for a fortnight and stopped. The fifth came in at forty feet and has not stopped since. Nobody can tell you why the fifth. The men who sank it could read the ground as well as anyone alive, and they will tell you plainly that the water decides.

That is the item on the inventory that no amount of competence reaches. He could plant the vines. He could ring them with palms, sow the gaps, lay out the whole holding in the pattern the best growers used. He could not put water under it.

This is where a large opinion of oneself meets something immovable, and it is worth letting it. Every single thing you are proud of sits on top of a layer you did not install. The ground water. The fact that your heart kept its rhythm through the night while you were not supervising. The reliability of the seasons, which is not a law of nature so much as a habit of His.

Pride is a short memory about the bottom of the stack. The man in this story had his whole life on a river somebody else had opened.

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.