Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 40 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:40

فَعَسَىٰ رَبِّىٓ أَن يُؤْتِيَنِ خَيْرًا مِّن جَنَّتِكَ وَيُرْسِلَ عَلَيْهَا حُسْبَانًا مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ فَتُصْبِحَ صَعِيدًا زَلَقًا

“It may be that my Lord will give me [something] better than your garden and will send upon it a [disastrous] penalty from the sky, and it will become a smooth, dusty ground,”

Saheeh International

Essence

He answers an absolute certainty with the word perhaps, and the only thing he names is a reckoning coming down out of the sky.

A reflection

A reckoning, sent down

The word for what comes down on the garden is from the root for counting.

The commentaries divide over it in a useful way. Several gloss it simply as a punishment from the sky, and one says fire. Another reads it as missiles, thunderbolts in the plural. One of the long commentaries takes a different line. The word is a verbal noun meaning reckoning. What is sent is an amount Allah has measured and calculated: the decree of the garden's ruin. One authority adds that the reckoning is the reckoning of what your own hands earned.

The lexicons on that root list something worth keeping. Counting and taking account of deeds. Exact measure, a precise calculated course. And, from the same letters, supposing: reckoning a thing to be so, often wrongly.

So the man who has been doing sums in his own garden is told that a sum is coming the other way.

At a quay every load is re-weighed on arrival. The carter has his own figure, written up before he left, and he believes it, and it is not a lie. It is simply a prediction, and the weigh-house is not interested in predictions. Nobody argues with the beam.

This is where a large self-assessment runs out. Pride is nearly always a private accounting system, kept honestly, with the owner as auditor. It does not fail because the figures were invented. It fails because there was a second set of scales all along, and the second set was never hidden.

The lexicons on this root note one more thing. The word for counting is also the word for enough. He counts, and He suffices.

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.