Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 86 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:86

حَتَّىٰٓ إِذَا بَلَغَ مَغْرِبَ ٱلشَّمْسِ وَجَدَهَا تَغْرُبُ فِى عَيْنٍ حَمِئَةٍ وَوَجَدَ عِندَهَا قَوْمًا ۗ قُلْنَا يَـٰذَا ٱلْقَرْنَيْنِ إِمَّآ أَن تُعَذِّبَ وَإِمَّآ أَن تَتَّخِذَ فِيهِمْ حُسْنًا

“Until, when he reached the setting of the sun [i.e., the west], he found it [as if] setting in a body of dark water,[795] and he found near it a people. We [i.e., Allāh] said, "O Dhul-Qarnayn, either you punish [them] or else adopt among them [a way of] goodness."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The verb is he found it, which the lexicons use for he saw: a report of what a traveller at a western shore perceived.

A reflection

He found it setting

This is the verse of the chapter most often quoted against it. The objection is simple and deserves to be stated at full strength.

The sun does not enter a pool of water. It is vastly larger than the earth. A book that says otherwise is a book of its time, and no amount of explaining will move it.

Now the words.

The verb is not the sun set in a spring. The verb is he found it setting. A linguistic commentary notes that this verb is used in the sense of he saw, and cites a lexicon for it. The sentence reports what a man at a particular place perceived.

A narration-based commentary, written in the thirteenth century, says it plainly. He saw the sun, to his view, setting in the encircling sea. And this, it adds, is the case for everyone who reaches that shore: he sees it as though it sets there.

The same commentary then says that actually reaching the sun's setting place in the sky is impossible. What the storytellers claim about it, it adds, has no reality at all.

A concise commentary from the same tradition is shorter still. Its setting in the spring is in the sight of the eye; otherwise it is greater than the world.

A warden at a bird observatory logs the sunset over the sea every night of the season. He writes down the time. He does not write down a position in the water. That is not a thing he saw. It is a thing the water did to his line of sight.

And the verse itself supplies the control. Four lines later the same man reaches the east and finds the sun rising upon a people. A legal commentary draws out the obvious: that does not mean the sun touched them. It means they were the first it rose upon.

So the idiom is the verse's own, used twice, and it was understood this way long before anyone had an instrument to check with.

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.