Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 44 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:44

هُنَالِكَ ٱلْوَلَـٰيَةُ لِلَّهِ ٱلْحَقِّ ۚ هُوَ خَيْرٌ ثَوَابًا وَخَيْرٌ عُقْبًا

“There[790] the authority is [completely] for Allāh, the Truth. He is best in reward and best in outcome.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The parable ends on a word for a heel: not what a thing is, but what walks along behind it.

A reflection

Nearness with nothing in between

The word rendered protection comes from a root the lexicons define as nearness with nothing in between. Their examples are worth having. The rain that follows the first rain. The friend at your side. The guardian who takes charge of another's affairs. And turning your face towards something, or turning your back on it.

So this is not protection at a distance, arranged by an authority somewhere else. It is the word for being right next to something, with no gap.

The verse before it has just removed every intermediary the man had. No party. No self-rescue. Nobody standing in the space.

And this verse says what was in that space all along.

In a cold glasshouse the stoker sleeps beside the furnace through the frosts. Not in the cottage. On a bench by the boiler, because the house dies at four degrees and the margin is about twenty minutes. Everyone who works there knows that the vines do not survive on heating. They survive on proximity.

This is where the arrogance in the story finally has nowhere to go, and it is worth noticing how gently it is taken away. Nobody is humiliated in this sentence. There is no triumph in it. It simply states where the nearness was located. The man's whole life had been an arrangement of distance. Layers of men, layers of land, layers of money, and himself at the centre.

Pride is mostly a system of intermediaries. The ego grows in the gaps.

Take away the gaps and there is nothing left for it to live in. Which is also, exactly, the description of mercy.

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.