Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 91 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:91

كَذَٰلِكَ وَقَدْ أَحَطْنَا بِمَا لَدَيْهِ خُبْرًا

“Thus.[797] And We had encompassed [all] that he had in knowledge.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The man who had looked at both ends of the world is told, in one line, that he had been looked at from the inside.

A reflection

The great observer, observed

For eight verses this man has been the one who sees. He reached, he found, he found again. The verbs of looking have all been his.

This verse takes them away from him in nine words.

The verb is a surrounding. The lexicons picture a wall built all the way round a vineyard: nothing inside escapes it, and everything inside is kept. The same root gives horsemen ringing a man so there is no way out.

And what is surrounded is not his territory. It is what was with him.

A narration-based commentary spells it out. We are informed of all his states and his army's. Nothing of it is hidden from Us, though their nations were scattered and the earth cut them off.

So the inventory being taken is of the baggage, the column, the orders given at night, the reasons.

There is a man who has photographed every country he has visited and never once sat for a portrait. He has forty thousand images and no idea what his own face does when he is tired.

That is not vanity. It is the ordinary condition of anyone whose attention points outward all day.

And it is where a particular pride hides very successfully. Not the pride that boasts. The pride of the observer. The one who assesses rooms, reads people quickly, forms accurate views of everybody present, and is never himself the subject of the exercise.

It feels like competence. It is a way of staying out of the frame.

This verse puts the most travelled eyes in the Qur'an inside somebody else's frame. In the middle of their greatest journey, with no comment and no warning.

And the knowledge named is not the kind that watches from outside. The root means knowing a thing from within, as you know a person after testing him.

He had seen the ends of the earth. He had never been out of view for a moment.

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.