Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 52 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:52

وَيَوْمَ يَقُولُ نَادُوا۟ شُرَكَآءِىَ ٱلَّذِينَ زَعَمْتُمْ فَدَعَوْهُمْ فَلَمْ يَسْتَجِيبُوا۟ لَهُمْ وَجَعَلْنَا بَيْنَهُم مَّوْبِقًا

“And [warn of] the Day when He will say, "Call My 'partners' whom you claimed," and they will invoke them, but they will not respond to them. And We will put between them [a valley of] destruction.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He calls them My partners, using their own word for them, and then lets them be called in front of everybody.

A reflection

My partners, in your words

Read the phrasing again. My partners. Spoken by Him, about things He has no partnership with, immediately followed by the words whom you claimed.

So the possessive is quoted. He is using their vocabulary back to them, in public. The commentaries read the whole address as a reproach delivered in front of all the witnesses.

And the verb for claimed is the one from four verses earlier. The lexicons illustrate its root with a she-camel whose fatness nobody can see, pressed with the hands to guess at it. Speech with nothing shown for it.

So the sentence is: call the ones you guessed at and then underwrote. The ones you called Mine.

In one saleroom a catalogue was reprinted after a dispute. The previous seller's own description was set in quotation marks on the page. Nobody added a word of commentary. The quotation marks did the entire job, and everybody who read it understood that something had been settled.

That is where pride finds itself with nothing to say. Arrogance always involves a description of reality that you authored. Usually about your own standing, sometimes about what you are relying on, and almost always one you have never tested.

The verse does not refute the description. It reads it back and then asks you to use it.

And notice the mercy buried in the sequence. This happens on the Day. Which means that today, the description is still a draft, and nobody has read it out.

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.