Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 8 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:8

وَإِنَّا لَجَـٰعِلُونَ مَا عَلَيْهَا صَعِيدًا جُرُزًا

“And indeed, We will make that which is upon it [into] a barren ground.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The jewellery of the previous ayah comes off in this one, and the word chosen is the one used of a blade that cuts clean.

A reflection

Not a prophecy, a standing intention

Look at the two ayat side by side. The first says We made. This one does not say We will make. It uses an active participle with the emphatic particle in front of it: We are the ones who are going to make.

That is a different kind of sentence. The first was a finished act. This one is a settled intention, held now, about the ground you are standing on.

So the stripping is not scheduled somewhere far off, in a chapter of a book about the end of the world. It is the standing policy for everything that is currently beautiful.

In a coppiced wood the worker cuts a panel right down to the stool. Hazel that was fifteen feet high in February is bare ground by March, and the stand looks ruined to anyone who walks past. The cycle was set before he was born and will outlast him. Nobody in the wood thinks of the cutting as a disaster, because the wood was never planted to stand still.

That is where pride loses its grip. The ego builds on the assumption that the ground it stands on is not itself under instruction. It can imagine losing something; it cannot imagine the whole surface going. So it measures itself against other people on the surface, which always works, because they are going too.

One commentary notes that other ayat close the last loophole. The earth itself will be changed to other than the earth (14:48).

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.