Makkan, by agreement
The later years in Makkah
Ibn al-Jawzī records it as Makkan from Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid and Qatādah, and calls this the agreement of the commentators, without any difference he knew of. Two exceptions are reported and neither is the stronger view: that ayah 28 came down in Madinah, and — from Muqātil — that its opening as far as ayah 8, and ayat 107–108, did. Al-Qurṭubī mentions the claim about the opening and answers it in three words: the first view is sounder.
رَوى أبُو صالِحٍ عَنِ ابْنِ عَبّاسٍ أنَّ سُورَةَ ( الكَهْفِ ) مَكِّيَّةٌ، وكَذَلِكَ قالَ الحَسَنُ، ومُجاهِدٌ، وقَتادَةُ. وهَذا إجْماعُ المُفَسِّرِينَ مِن غَيْرِ خِلافٍ نَعْلَمُهُوَهِيَ مَكِّيَّةٌ فِي قَوْلِ جَمِيعِ الْمُفَسِّرِينَ. رُوِيَ عَنْ فِرْقَةٍ أَنَّ أَوَّلَ السُّورَةِ نَزَلَ بِالْمَدِينَةِ إِلَى قَوْلِهِ: جُرُزاً، وَالْأَوَّلُ أَصَحُّThe same, in other works
- al-Suyūṭīal-Durr al-manthūrAshʿarī in creedShāfiʿī in fiqh→
Ibn ʿAbbās: it came down in Makkah. Recorded by al-Naḥḥās and Ibn Mardawayh.
أخْرَجَ النَّحّاسُ في ناسِخِهِ، وابْنُ مَرْدُويَهْ، عَنِ اِبْنِ عَبّاسٍ قالَ: نَزَلَتْ سُورَةُ الكَهْفِ بِمَكَّةَ
A report he gathers; its chain is not graded here.
- al-ShawkānīFatḥ al-qadīr→
Makkan, by agreement, citing al-Qurṭubī.
قالَ القُرْطُبِيُّ: وهي مَكِّيَّةٌ في قَوْلِ جَمِيعِ المُفَسِّرِينَ
- al-RāzīMafātīḥ al-ghaybAshʿarī in creedShāfiʿī in fiqh→
Makkan.
مِائَةٌ وإحْدى عَشْرَةَ آيَةً مَكِّيَّةً
- Abū al-SuʿūdIrshād al-ʿaql al-salīmMāturīdī in creedḤanafī in fiqh→
Makkan, with the exception he names.
سُورَةُ الكَهْفِ مَكِّيَّةٌ إلّا الآياتِ ثَمانِيَةً وعِشْرِينَ ومِن آيَةِ ثَلاثَةٍ وثَمانِينَ إلى آيَةِ إحْدى ومِائَةٍ فَمَدَنِيَّةٌ، وآياتُها عَشْرٌ ومِائَةٌ
Each line of English says what the Arabic beneath it says.
What was happening
It came down in the later years in Makkah, when the argument had been running for a long time. Quraysh had run out of answers of their own: they could not call the Qurʾan poetry — they had poets, and it was not that; they could not call him a liar — they had named him the Trustworthy themselves. What they still had was power, and the believers were a small community under pressure, being asked to give up either its faith or its place in the city.
To such people the surah shows others who faced the same choice. Young men who left their city and took shelter in a cave, saying: “Our Lord, grant us mercy from Yourself, and provide for us right guidance in our affair.” A man with two gardens who forgot who had given them. Mūsā, a messenger of resolve, travelling to learn from a servant of Allah who had been taught what he had not. And a ruler given the means to everything, who reached the setting place of the sun and its rising, and said of his greatest work: “This is a mercy from my Lord.”
Four trials, then — of faith, of wealth, of knowledge and of power — and in the middle of them the one who stands behind every trial, refusing to bow (18:50). The Prophet ﷺ tied the surah to the last and greatest of them: whoever keeps ten ayat of its opening by heart, he said, will be protected from the Dajjāl.
Within the stories it sets a correction, gentle and permanent, about how a servant speaks of tomorrow: “Do not say of anything, ‘I shall do that tomorrow,’ without ‘if Allah wills’” (18:23). And it tells the Prophet ﷺ whose company to keep: “Keep yourself patient with those who call upon their Lord morning and evening, seeking His Face, and do not let your eyes pass beyond them” (18:28).
What came down about what
The nobles and the poor
The leading men of Quraysh asked the Prophet ﷺ to sit with them alone and to keep the poorer believers — Bilāl, ʿAmmār, Ṣuhayb, Khabbāb, Ibn Masʿūd — in a gathering of their own. He was told instead to keep himself patiently with those who call upon their Lord morning and evening. Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ describes the same demand in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (2413), concerning the sister ayah in al-Anʿām (6:52).
Ibn Kathīr, who introduces it with “it is said”. Al-Ṭabarī, al-Baghawī, Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Qurṭubī and al-Suyūṭī relate it too.
Related, not gradedRelated by the commentators without a graded chain; not established as authentic.
يُقَالُ: إِنَّهَا نَزَلَتْ فِي أَشْرَافِ قُرَيْشٍ، حِينَ طَلَبُوا مِنَ النَّبِيِّ ﷺ أَنْ يَجْلِسَ مَعَهُمْ وَحْدَهُ وَلَا يُجَالِسَهُمْ بِضُعَفَاءِ أَصْحَابِهِ كَبِلَالٍ وَعَمَّارٍ وَصُهَيْبٍMūsā and al-Khiḍr, as he ﷺ told it
Ubayy ibn Kaʿb heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ tell what lay behind the journey. Mūsā stood up to address the Children of Israel and was asked: who is the most knowing of people? He said: “I am.” Allah reproved him, because he had not referred the knowledge back to Him, and revealed to him: “I have a servant at the meeting of the two seas who knows more than you.” Mūsā said: “My Lord, how can I reach him?” He was told to carry a fish in a basket: wherever he lost the fish, there the man would be.
He set out with his young attendant, Yūshaʿ ibn Nūn. At the rock they laid down their heads and slept. The fish stirred in the basket, slipped out of it and fell into the sea, and Allah held back the flow of the water from it, so that it stood over its path like an arch. When Mūsā woke, his companion forgot to tell him. They walked on for the rest of that day and through the night, and the next morning Mūsā said: “Bring us our meal; this journey of ours has wearied us” — and he had felt no weariness, the Prophet ﷺ said, until he had passed the place Allah had commanded. The young man remembered: at the rock he had forgotten the fish, and it had taken its way into the sea, a thing to wonder at. “That is what we were seeking,” said Mūsā, and they turned back, following their own footprints.
At the rock was a man wrapped in a garment. Mūsā greeted him, and al-Khiḍr said: “And how is there a greeting of peace in your land?” — “I am Mūsā.” — “Mūsā of the Children of Israel?” — “Yes. I have come to you so that you may teach me something of the right guidance you have been taught.” He said: “You will not be able to bear with me patiently. Mūsā, I have a knowledge from the knowledge of Allah which He has taught me and which you do not know; and you have a knowledge from the knowledge of Allah which He has taught you and which I do not know.” Mūsā promised patience, and al-Khiḍr set his condition: if you follow me, ask me about nothing until I speak of it to you myself.
They walked along the shore. A ship passed, and its people recognised al-Khiḍr and took them aboard without a fare. Before Mūsā knew it he had prised out one of the ship’s planks with an adze. “People who carried us for nothing — and you go to their ship and breach it, to drown those aboard?” — “Did I not say you would not be able to bear with me?” — “Do not hold me to what I forgot.” The first, said the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, was forgetfulness on Mūsā’s part. Then a sparrow came and perched on the edge of the ship and dipped its beak once into the sea, and al-Khiḍr said to him: “My knowledge and your knowledge, beside the knowledge of Allah, are no more than what this sparrow has taken from the sea.”
They left the ship, and as they walked on the shore al-Khiḍr saw a boy playing with other boys, and killed him. “Have you killed an innocent soul, when he had killed no one?” — and this, he ﷺ said, was harder than the first. Mūsā said: “If I ask you about anything after this, keep me with you no longer.” They came to a town and asked its people for food, and were refused hospitality; and there they found a wall, leaning, about to fall, and al-Khiḍr set it straight with his hand. Mūsā said: “People we came to who would not feed us or take us in — had you wished, you could have taken a wage for it.” He said: “This is the parting between me and you,” and told him the meaning of the three things he had not been able to bear.
And the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “We would have loved Mūsā to have been patient, so that Allah might have told us more of what passed between them.”
Ubayy ibn Kaʿb, through Ibn ʿAbbās: al-Bukhārī (4725) and Muslim (2380).
Ṣaḥīḥ
بيان منهج التعامل مع الفتن، وضرب النماذج لذلك.
To set out how a believer is to deal with trials, and to give living examples of it.
The surah’s aim, as al-Mukhtaṣar fī al-Tafsīr states it
- Trial
- Refuge in Allah
- The life of this world
- Knowledge and humility
- Power and gratitude
- The Hour
Its aims, as Ibn ʿĀshūr sets them out
افتتحت بالتحميد على إنزال الكتاب للتنويه بالقرآن تطاولا من الله تعالى على المشركين وملقنيهم من أهل الكتاب.
وأدمج فيه إنذار المعاندين الذين نسبوا لله ولدا، وبشارة للمؤمنين، وتسلية رسول الله صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم عن أقوالهم حين تريث الوحي لما اقتضته سنة الله مع أوليائه من إظهار عتبه على الغفلة عن مراعاة الآداب الكاملة.
وذكر افتتان المشركين بالحياة الدنيا وزينتها وأنها لا تكسب النفوس تزكية.
From its first ayah to its last
- 1–88 ayat · 5% of the surahRead from ayah 1 →
A Book with no crookedness in it
Praise to Allah, who sent down the Book upon His servant and made it straight: a warning of a severe punishment, good news for the believers, and a warning to those who say that Allah has taken a son. The Prophet ﷺ is consoled — do not grieve yourself to death over them — and the key to the whole surah is given: everything on the earth is an adornment, set there to test which of them is best in deed.
- 9–2618 ayat · 21% of the surahRead from ayah 9 →
The Companions of the Cave
The first story, and the trial of faith. Young men who believed in their Lord when their people did not, and who left everything and took shelter in a cave with a single prayer (18:10). Allah made them sleep for three hundred years and nine, turned them from side to side, and woke them as a sign that His promise is true and the Hour is not in doubt. Inside the story, the lesson about “tomorrow” (18:23).
- 27–315 ayat · 7% of the surahRead from ayah 27 →
Whose company to keep
Recite what has been revealed to you; no one changes His words. Keep yourself patient with those who call on their Lord morning and evening, and do not let your eyes pass beyond them to the glitter of this life. The truth is from your Lord: whoever wills may believe, and whoever wills may refuse — and then the Fire, and the Gardens.
- 32–4413 ayat · 11% of the surahRead from ayah 32 →
The man of the two gardens
The second story, and the trial of wealth. Two men, one of them given two gardens of vines and palms with a river between them. He walks into his garden wronging himself: “I do not think this will ever perish, and I do not think the Hour is coming.” His companion answers him with the words every believer has since been taught to say on seeing what pleases him (18:39). By morning the garden is fallen on its trellises.
- 45–495 ayat · 6% of the surahRead from ayah 45 →
What this life is like
Rain, and a green that the wind scatters the next day. Wealth and children are the adornment of this life, and the lasting good deeds are better with your Lord. Then the day the mountains are moved, the people are stood in rows, and the record is laid open that leaves out nothing small or great.
- 50–5910 ayat · 11% of the surahRead from ayah 50 →
The enemy, and the excuse
Iblīs refused to bow to Ādam — will you then take him and his offspring as allies in place of Me? Every kind of example has been set out in this Qurʾan, and man is more given to argument than anything. Nothing kept them from believing except waiting for what befell those before them; and your Lord is the Forgiving, full of mercy — the towns were not destroyed until they had been given their term.
- 60–8223 ayat · 19% of the surahRead from ayah 60 →
Mūsā and al-Khiḍr
The third story, and the trial of knowledge. Mūsā, asked who was the most learned of men, had answered that he was; so he was sent to a servant of Allah who had been taught what he had not (al-Bukhārī 122, Muslim 2380). A boat is holed, a boy is killed, a wall is rebuilt for nothing — and three times Mūsā cannot be patient with what he has no knowledge of. Then each is explained, and behind each is a mercy that could not be seen from where he stood.
- 83–9816 ayat · 12% of the surahRead from ayah 83 →
Dhū al-Qarnayn
The fourth story, and the trial of power. A king who was given the means to everything and followed them to the setting of the sun, to its rising, and to a people between two mountains who begged him for a barrier against Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj. He builds it of iron and molten copper, refuses their payment, and says what the owner of the garden never said: “This is a mercy from my Lord.”
- 99–11012 ayat · 9% of the surahRead from ayah 99 →
The greatest losers
The barrier will come down when the promise comes; the Trumpet is blown. “Shall We tell you who loses most in their deeds? Those whose effort is lost in this life while they think they are doing good.” For those who believe and do right, the Gardens of Firdaws. If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord it would run dry first. And the last ayah gathers the surah into one sentence: whoever hopes to meet his Lord, let him do righteous work, and associate no one in the worship of his Lord.
The division into passages is a reading aid, written for this page; it is not part of the muṣḥaf. Each passage is drawn as long as its words are.
The sound each ayah closes on
Read aloud, every ayah closes on a sound — its fāṣilah — and the closes answer one another for a stretch, then turn. Each sound this surah closes on is a line of the staff below, and the surah is the gold line stepping along them, an ayah at a time: where it steps to another line, the rhyme turns. The dotted lines are where its passages begin.
All 110 of its ayat close on one sound.
Move along the staff to see what each ayah closes on.
Computed from the text, each ayah as it is said when the reciter stops on it: the last vowel falls away, tanwīn on alif is said as a long ā, and tāʾ marbūṭah as h. Closes the ear hears as one rhyme share a line — -ūn, -īn and -īm; -ān and -ām — and an ayah that is only the opening letters closes on the name of its last letter.
From the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions
مَنْ حَفِظَ عَشْرَ آيَاتٍ مِنْ أَوَّلِ سُورَةِ الْكَهْفِ عُصِمَ مِنَ الدَّجَّالِ
“Whoever memorises ten ayat from the beginning of Sūrat al-Kahf will be protected from the Dajjāl.” In another wording in Muslim: “from the end of al-Kahf.”In the long hadith of the Dajjāl: “Whoever among you lives to see him, let him recite over him the opening ayat of Sūrat al-Kahf.”تِلْكَ السَّكِينَةُ تَنَزَّلَتْ بِالْقُرْآنِ
A man was reciting Sūrat al-Kahf with a horse tethered beside him, and a cloud came over him and drew nearer and nearer until the horse began to shy. In the morning he told the Prophet ﷺ, who said: “That was the tranquillity, descending for the Qurʾan.”“Whoever recites Sūrat al-Kahf on the day of Friday, a light will shine for him between the two Fridays.”The names it is known by
After the cave in which the young men took refuge with their faith (ayat 9–26). It is the name the Prophet ﷺ used: “Whoever memorises ten ayat from the beginning of Sūrat al-Kahf…” (Muslim 809).
A longer form of the same name, found in some reports and in the books of tafsir.
Its place in the muṣḥaf
Ayat you will hear named
- 18:10The prayer of the young men
- 18:23–24“If Allah wills”
- 18:28Keep yourself patient with those who call on their Lord
- 18:39Mā shāʾ Allāh, lā quwwata illā billāh
- 18:46Wealth and children, and the lasting good deeds
- 18:65A servant from among Our servants
- 18:103–104Those who lose most in their deeds
- 18:109If the sea were ink
- 18:110“I am only a man like you”
Where this comes from
The figures at the head of the page are counted from the text. The Arabic quotations are taken letter for letter from the copies of the classical works held on this site, and each links to the passage it stands in. The rest was written for Mishkāt from the works below. It is an introduction, not a tafsir: where it matters, read the scholars themselves.
Works quoted on this page
- تفسير ابن الجوزيZād al-masīrAbū al-Faraj ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597 AH)
- تفسير القرطبيal-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-QurʾānShams al-Dīn al-Qurṭubī (d. 671 AH)
- تفسير ابن كثيرTafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīmIsmāʿīl ibn Kathīr (d. 774 AH)
- الدر المنثورal-Durr al-manthūrJalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911 AH)
- فتح القدير للشوكانيFatḥ al-qadīrMuḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1250 AH)
- تفسير الرازيMafātīḥ al-ghaybFakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606 AH)
- تفسير أبي السعودIrshād al-ʿaql al-salīmAbū al-Suʿūd al-ʿImādī (d. 982 AH)
- التحرير والتنويرal-Taḥrīr wa-l-tanwīrMuḥammad al-Ṭāhir ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1393 AH)
- المختصر في التفسيرal-Mukhtaṣar fī al-tafsīrMarkaz Tafsīr, a committee of scholars
Beside each scholar quoted stand his creed and his school of fiqh, so that he can be read with discernment. The site’s library holds other commentaries as well; the introductions do not draw on them.
al-Qurṭubī is quoted on these pages only for what he transmits: who said a surah is Makkan or Madinan, and what it has been called. On the attributes of Allah his commentary interprets, in places, in the way of the Ashʿarīs rather than the way of the Salaf, and nothing of that is taken from him here.
al-Rāzī and Abū al-Suʿūd are quoted on these pages only for where a surah came down, and Ibn ʿĀshūr only for the aims of the surah. Nothing on the attributes of Allah is taken from them, and no report comes by way of them. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s statement of the aims is not in the site’s copy of his book: it is read from the Shamela typing as OpenITI holds it, with reports and al-Zamakhsharī’s words left out, and it links to its page there.
Every hadith here says where it is recorded and how it is graded. What is in al-Bukhārī or Muslim is marked ṣaḥīḥ. Outside the two, the grading followed is al-Albānī’s; where none of his was found, the scholar who graded it is named. A report known to be weak or fabricated is not given here at all. A report that is ḥasan, or a Companion’s own saying, or related by the commentators without a graded chain, says so beside it. In the account of what was happening, a small sign after a sentence says the same of the report that sentence tells, and a question mark stands where a date or a figure is not certain, or beside a grading — underlined — that has something to say about its own source: rest on it, or touch it, and it gives the reason. What is drawn from the sīrah — the campaigns, the dates, who was present — is history as its scholars transmit it, and is not graded here.
Also drawn on
- Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim
The order of revelation is the one printed at the head of each surah in the Egyptian muṣḥaf, which rests on lists transmitted from Ibn ʿAbbās and Jābir ibn Zayd. It places a surah by where it began. Many surahs came down in parts, over years, and the scholars treat the list as a guide, not a certainty.