Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 61 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:61

فَلَمَّا بَلَغَا مَجْمَعَ بَيْنِهِمَا نَسِيَا حُوتَهُمَا فَٱتَّخَذَ سَبِيلَهُۥ فِى ٱلْبَحْرِ سَرَبًا

“But when they reached the junction between them, they forgot their fish, and it took its course into the sea, slipping away.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The word for the fish's tunnel and the word for a mirage come from one root, in a surah about false appearances.

A reflection

An arch, standing in water

Sahih al-Bukhari gives the detail the verse compresses. Allah held back from the fish the flow of the water, so that it became like an arch over it.

An arch. In water.

Another narration in the same collection says the trail looked as if its track were in stone. The narrator made a ring with his thumb and the finger beside it to show the size.

The sea is the one surface people are certain cannot be written on. You can cut a road through rock. You can mark sand for a season. Water closes behind everything, which is exactly why it is the standing image for the futility of effort.

Here it does not close.

And the smallness of the thing it is held open for is the part that should land. Not an army crossing. Not a prophet's staff parting a sea, which had already happened to this same man. One fish, going about its own business, and the water stands aside and stays standing.

In a towing tank a hull is pulled down a long basin while instruments hold the shape of its wake long enough to be measured. The effort involved is considerable. The wake itself lasts seconds, and the whole apparatus exists to catch something that will not stay.

That is the best a very good laboratory can do, with enormous resource, for a few moments.

The ego's working assumption is that permanence has to be earned, and that what you leave behind depends on how much weight you brought. Almost everything we do is organised around making a mark that holds.

This verse has a dead salted fish leaving a corridor in the sea.

So the question is not whether a mark can be made. The question is who is holding the water, and nobody in this account asked Him to.

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.