Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 58 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:58

وَرَبُّكَ ٱلْغَفُورُ ذُو ٱلرَّحْمَةِ ۖ لَوْ يُؤَاخِذُهُم بِمَا كَسَبُوا۟ لَعَجَّلَ لَهُمُ ٱلْعَذَابَ ۚ بَل لَّهُم مَّوْعِدٌ لَّن يَجِدُوا۟ مِن دُونِهِۦ مَوْئِلًا

“And your Lord is the Forgiving, the possessor of mercy. If He were to impose blame upon them for what they earned, He would have hastened for them the punishment. Rather, for them is an appointment from which they will never find an escape.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The last word is not a hiding place but a refuge where you actually get away, and the verse says there is none.

A reflection

Owner of the thing itself

The verse could have said the Merciful. It says the Owner of mercy.

One commentary argues at length that the second is the stronger of the two. To call a man the owner of knowledge says more than to call him knowing. The first makes him the holder of the whole substance. The second only reports that the quality is in him.

That commentary adds a second reason for the wording. The two famous names of mercy are each usually felt to belong to one world or the other. Owner of mercy is tied to neither, so nothing is fenced off.

A dispute runs beside this about which description carries more intensity, and the commentaries do not settle it. What nobody disputes is the possession.

Now hold that against your own supply.

In one hill village a man carried two buckets up from the spring twice a day for fifty years. He was known for being free with his water, and he was. He did not own the spring.

That is the exact size of human mercy. You can be good with what you were handed. You cannot be where it comes from.

Pride at this point usually takes a modest shape. Nobody claims out loud to be merciful as God is merciful. What happens instead is quieter. A man comes to feel that his patience with a difficult relative is an achievement of his own character.

It is two buckets, carried uphill, from water that surfaced somewhere else.

And the ownership is exactly why the next clause can say what it says. Someone who owns the spring can afford to wait twenty years. A man with two buckets cannot afford to wait at all.

That is why human patience runs out on a timetable and His does not. The verse names the attribute, and then spends it immediately on people who had earned the opposite.

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.