Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 76 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:76

قَالَ إِن سَأَلْتُكَ عَن شَىْءٍۭ بَعْدَهَا فَلَا تُصَـٰحِبْنِى ۖ قَدْ بَلَغْتَ مِن لَّدُنِّى عُذْرًا

“[Moses] said, "If I should ask you about anything after this, then do not keep me as a companion. You have obtained from me an excuse."”

Saheeh International

Essence

He hands the other man the ground to dismiss him, and names the term himself before anybody asks.

A reflection

He writes the terms of his own dismissal

Read quickly, this sounds like a man losing patience and threatening to leave.

It is the opposite.

He is not proposing to go. He is proposing that the other man send him away, and he is supplying the condition under which that would be fair.

And then he goes further. You have reached, from my side, a ground for it.

So he supplies the justification too. Nobody asked for any of this. The teacher had said one sentence with one word added.

The verb for keeping company here is the mutual form: company kept on both sides. One reading of it, recorded in the commentaries, turns it the other way: do not leave me to accompany you.

Either way, Musa is handing a decision to somebody else and loading it in that man's favour.

A club captain who has let the side down twice can do one of two things at the committee. He can explain. Or he can say that if it happens again they should drop him, and mean it.

The second is rarer because it is irreversible. You cannot take back a term you have set yourself.

And this is the point at which the passage becomes a model rather than a story. Two breaches, no defence offered, no promise renewed, and no appeal to how well he has done otherwise.

Instead: a condition, a consequence, and an admission that the other man already has grounds.

One commentary draws out exactly that. It says an excuse stands after one occasion, and from the second the case is established beyond argument.

Musa saw that before he was told it.

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.