Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of The Glorious Koran. An Explanatory Translation (1930)

SÛRAH XVIII

Al-Kahf, “The Cave” takes its name from the story of the youths who took refuge from persecution in a cave (vv. 10–27) and were preserved there as if asleep for a long period — a story which is generally identified by Western writers (e.g. Gibbon) with the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. But a strong tradition in the Muslim world asserts that this story and that of Dhû’l Qarneyn (“The TwoHorned One”), vv. 83–98, possibly also that of Moses and the angel, vv. 60–82, were revealed to the Prophet to enable him to answer the questions which the Jewish doctors of Yathrib had instructed the idolaters to ask him, as a test of Prophethood.

The questions were three: “Ask him,” said the Rabbis, “of some youths who were of old, what was their fate, for they have a strange story; and ask him of a much-travelled man who reached the sunrise regions of the earth and the sun-set regions thereof, what was his history; and ask him of the Spirit, what it is.”

The tormentors of the Prophet, who had been to Yathrib to get hints from the Jews, on their return to Mecca put these questions to the Prophet, after having told the people that it was to be a crucial test. The Prophet said that he would surely answer them upon the morrow, without adding “if God will,” as though he could command God’s revelation. As a reproof for that omission, the wished-for revelation was withheld from him for some days, and when it came included the rebuke contained in verse 24.¹ There is no reason whatever to doubt the truth of the tradition which connects this chapter with three questions set by Jewish rabbis, and the answers must have been considered satisfying, or at least silencing, or the Jews would certainly have made fun of them when they were taunting the Prophet daily after his flight to Yathrib (Al-Madînah). That being so, it would seem rash to identify the story with that of the Christian Seven Sleepers; it must belong, as the story of the “Two-Horned One” actually does belong, to rabbinical lore. The third of the questions is answered in Sûrah XVII, vv. 85 ff.

It belongs to the middle group of Meccan Sûrahs.