Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 80 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:80

وَأَمَّا ٱلْغُلَـٰمُ فَكَانَ أَبَوَاهُ مُؤْمِنَيْنِ فَخَشِينَآ أَن يُرْهِقَهُمَا طُغْيَـٰنًا وَكُفْرًا

“And as for the boy, his parents were believers, and we feared that he would overburden them by transgression and disbelief.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The word for what he would have brought on them pictures a flood coming down with more water than its bed can hold.

A reflection

The reason given is about the parents

Almost everybody reads this as a sentence about the boy. He was going to turn out badly, so he was taken.

Read the grammar again. The subject of the fear is not what would happen to him.

His parents were believers. The thing feared is what he would bring on them.

So the stated reason is the protection of two other people. The boy's own future is mentioned only as the mechanism, never as the charge.

And the next verse continues in the same direction. What is intended is a replacement for them. Them, not him.

This matters because of how the passage gets used. Taken as a verdict on the boy, it becomes a licence to speculate about people's futures, which is exactly the capacity nobody has.

Taken as it is written, it is an account of two believers being protected from something nobody could see coming.

A transfer can be minuted as being about one man and in fact be about the two people who trained him. Everybody involved reads the paper and draws the wrong conclusion, because the paper names only the one who moved.

And here the paper is explicit, if you read who the verbs belong to.

Two believers. A fear about them. A replacement for them. A mercy, two verses later, from their Lord.

Four clauses, and the person being protected in every one of them is not the one in the title.

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.