Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 63 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:63

قَالَ أَرَءَيْتَ إِذْ أَوَيْنَآ إِلَى ٱلصَّخْرَةِ فَإِنِّى نَسِيتُ ٱلْحُوتَ وَمَآ أَنسَىٰنِيهُ إِلَّا ٱلشَّيْطَـٰنُ أَنْ أَذْكُرَهُۥ ۚ وَٱتَّخَذَ سَبِيلَهُۥ فِى ٱلْبَحْرِ عَجَبًا

“He said, "Did you see when we retired to the rock? Indeed, I forgot [there] the fish. And none made me forget it except Satan - that I should mention it. And it took its course into the sea amazingly."”

Saheeh International

Essence

He did not forget the fish; he says he was made to forget the mentioning of it, which is a different loss entirely.

A reflection

He forgot the telling, not the fish

The ordinary reading has a young man confessing that he lost the fish, and blaming the devil for his memory.

Read the clause again, in the order the Arabic gives it. Nothing made me forget it, that I should mention it.

One early reading of the verse moves the words so the point cannot be missed: nothing made me forget to mention it except Satan.

So what went missing was not the event. He had seen it. He could describe it, and in the next breath he does, with precision and in detail.

What he lost was the act of saying it out loud to the man walking beside him.

That is a far more common failure than forgetfulness, and it does not feel like a failure at the time. It feels like a thing you are about to do.

A man notices a wasp nest in the eaves in May. He thinks each week that he will mention it. He mentions it in September, after a child is stung on the step. His honest account is that he never forgot the nest for a single week.

He is telling the truth. He had the information the whole time. What he never had was the sentence.

This matters for a weekly reader of this surah, because the fault here is not a dramatic one. Nobody lied. Nobody was negligent in the way a court would recognise.

A day and a night of walking were spent in the wrong direction because a thing that had been seen was never put into words.

And the verse does not let him off, or condemn him. It simply records exactly which part of him stopped working.

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.