Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 55 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:55

وَمَا مَنَعَ ٱلنَّاسَ أَن يُؤْمِنُوٓا۟ إِذْ جَآءَهُمُ ٱلْهُدَىٰ وَيَسْتَغْفِرُوا۟ رَبَّهُمْ إِلَّآ أَن تَأْتِيَهُمْ سُنَّةُ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ أَوْ يَأْتِيَهُمُ ٱلْعَذَابُ قُبُلًا

“And nothing has prevented the people from believing when guidance came to them and from asking forgiveness of their Lord except that there [must] befall them the [accustomed] precedent of the former peoples[794] or that the punishment should come [directly] before them.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The commentaries say it was never a lack of clarity: what stopped them was a demand to be shown the punishment face to face.

A reflection

A course already run

The word rendered way is sunna, and the lexicons begin it with water. The flowing of a thing, running on smoothly in one course. From that the word for a way: a course somebody has set running.

And they list the two uses that matter here. The settled way of Allah with people, never found altered. And the way of the earlier peoples: the precedent that has already run its course.

The root does more. The mud man was shaped from is described with a word from it, meaning poured out and smoothed. A tooth takes its name from here, likened to a spearhead. And drawing iron across the stone until it is long and sharp is from the same letters.

So one root gives water running in a channel, a thing smoothed by pouring, and a blade being whetted.

In one field you can still see where a river ran two hundred years ago. The ground dips, the grass comes differently, and in a wet February the dip holds water as though nothing had changed. Houses were built in it in the nineteen-sixties by people who had looked at a map rather than at the field.

The river had set a course. The course was still there.

This is where a large sense of one's own case quietly collapses. Pride on the big questions nearly always takes the form of novelty. My situation is different. My doubts are modern. Nobody has been where I am.

The verse answers that without raising its voice. There is a channel. It has run before. It is still in the ground.

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.