Al-Kahf

ALL PRAISE is due to God, who has bestowed. this divine writ from on high upon His servant, and has not allowed any deviousness to obscure its meaning:

[a divine writ] unerringly straight, meant to warn [the godless] of a severe punishment from Him, and to give unto the believers who do good works the glad tiding that theirs shall be a goodly reward-

[a state of bliss] in which they. shall dwell beyond the count of time.

Furthermore, [this divine writ is meant] to warn all those who assert, "God has taken unto Himself a son."

No knowledge whatever have they of Him, and neither had their forefathers: dreadful -is this saying that comes out of their mouths, [and] nothing but falsehood do they utter!

But wouldst thou, perhaps, torment thyself to death with grief over them if they are not willing to believe in this message?

Behold, We have willed that all beauty on earth be a means by which We put men to a test, [showing] which of them are best in conduct;

and, verily, [in time] We shall reduce all that is on it to barren dust!

[AND SINCE the life of this world is but a test, dost thou [really] think that [the parable of] the Men of the Cave and of [their devotion to] the scriptures could be deemed more wondrous than any [other] of Our messages?

When those youths took refuge in the cave, they prayed: "O our Sustainer! Bestow on us grace from Thyself, and endow us, whatever our [outward] condition, with consciousness of what is right!"

And thereupon We veiled their ears in the cave for many a year,

and then We awakened Christianity was no longer persecuted and had even become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The ancient coin (dating from the reign of Decius) with which the young man wanted to pay for his purchases immediately aroused curiosity; people began to question the stranger, and the story of the Men of the Cave and their miraculous sleep came to light. them: [and We did all this] so that We might mark out [to the world] which of the two points of view showed a better comprehension of the time-span during which they had remained in this state.

[And now] We shall truly relate to thee their story: Behold, they were young men who had attained to faith in their Sustainer: and [so] We deepened their consciousness of the right way

and endowed their hearts with strength, so that they stood up and said [to one another]: "Our Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth. Never shall we invoke any deity other than Him: [if we did,] we should indeed have uttered an enormity!

These people of ours have taken to worshipping [other] deities instead of Him, without being able to adduce any reasonable evidence in support of their beliefs; and who could be more wicked than he who invents a lie about God?