Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 42 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:42

وَأُحِيطَ بِثَمَرِهِۦ فَأَصْبَحَ يُقَلِّبُ كَفَّيْهِ عَلَىٰ مَآ أَنفَقَ فِيهَا وَهِىَ خَاوِيَةٌ عَلَىٰ عُرُوشِهَا وَيَقُولُ يَـٰلَيْتَنِى لَمْ أُشْرِكْ بِرَبِّىٓ أَحَدًا

“And his fruits were encompassed [by ruin], so he began to turn his hands about [in dismay] over what he had spent on it, while it had collapsed upon its trellises, and said, "Oh, I wish I had not associated with my Lord anyone."[789]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The vine lies across its own frames, and the only thing he can think about is the money he put in.

A reflection

He grieves over the spend, not the loss

Read the object of his grief carefully. Not at his garden. At what he had spent on it.

One of the long commentaries describes the gesture precisely. A man in deep grief claps one hand on the other, or rubs one across the other. And it says what the remorse is for: what he had laid out on the garden about which his brother had warned him.

So his last recorded thought is not about the water, or the vines, or the years. It is the outlay.

The lexicons on the word for palm give it as a whole hand closing round something, with nothing left outside its grip. From the same root come holding back and warding off, and the hem or edge of a thing. And one further sense: anything ring-shaped, including the pan of a balance.

Two palms. Two scale pans. He is turning the two sides of his own accounting over and finding both of them empty.

A man who lost a business spent the next two years unable to talk about anything except the figure he had put into it. Not the work. Not the people. The sum. His wife said that if the money had come back he would have been content. The years were not part of the calculation, because they had never been entered.

That is the shape of a life lived as an investment. Even the ruin is priced.

And the thing to notice is that his grief is real. He is genuinely in pain. It is simply pain about the wrong item, which is the one kind of grief nothing can repair.

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.