Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 84 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:84

إِنَّا مَكَّنَّا لَهُۥ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَءَاتَيْنَـٰهُ مِن كُلِّ شَىْءٍ سَبَبًا

“Indeed, We established him upon the earth, and We gave him from everything a way [i.e., means].”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every verb in this verse is Allah's, and the word for what the man was given is, in the lexicons, a climbing rope.

A reflection

A rope up every palm

The last word of this verse is one the lexicons explain with a single picture. A sabab is the rope used to climb a tall palm tree.

From that came its wider use. Anything by which you reach a thing was called a sabab. The commentaries here gloss it as a road, a means, an instrument, or knowledge. One concise reading says plainly: a way that brings him to what he wants.

So the sentence is not that he was given everything. It is that for every thing he needed, he was handed the rope up to it.

And look at who is holding the rope out. We established him. We gave him. The man whose reach became a byword is, grammatically, the object of both verbs from beginning to end. He does nothing in this verse at all.

The word for established carries its own picture. One lexicon traces it to a settled place. The commentaries read the phrase here as the ground made level and smooth under him, his routes made easy.

A telegraph linesman is issued climbing irons and a leather belt before he goes up his first pole. Nobody in the village admires the irons. They watch the man forty feet up and think him fearless.

He is not fearless. He is equipped.

This is where a quiet pride goes very wide of the mark. Most people do not boast about their circumstances; they simply never think about them. The language they were raised speaking. The body that holds. The teacher who happened to notice. The year they were born in.

Every one of those is a rope lowered to you before you reached for anything.

The verse puts the giving first, and the whole long account of what he did with it afterwards. That order is the lesson, and it is the order nobody tells their own life story in.

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.