Companions of the Cave (Ashab al-Kahf)

Sheikh Omar Abdelkafy describes the cave in which the young men took refuge as narrow and dark, and says they went into it without any prior sign of relief. ¹

The Sheikh asks his listeners about the cave, whether it is wide or narrow and lit or dark, and concludes that it is narrow and dark ¹. He then says that the young men took refuge in this cave without any prior sign of relief, even though they hoped that their Lord would spread His mercy over them ¹.

The "people of the cave" are the youths whom Christian Europe calls the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. In the legend, during the persecution of Christians under the emperor Decius (249-251), seven Christian youths fled into a cave near Ephesus and fell into a miraculous sleep; discovered after a long time, they went to sleep for ever. Their resting place was considered a place of worship at least from the beginning of the sixth century AD. The story exists in many Oriental and Occidental literatures, especially Greek and Syriac, and the Greek version seems the earliest. ²

Muhammad took the legend, like many stories of Jewish and Christian origin, and used it for edification in the Qur'an, sura 18 (verses 9-26), whence the sura takes its name, the Sura of the Cave. The outlines are clear: the youths fled into the cave to remain true to the belief in one God; they slept miraculously for 309 years (verse 25), which seemed to them at most a day (verse 19); and their discovery came when one of them went into the city with old coins to buy food. Some details remain doubtful. The Qur'an itself says the number of the youths is variously given, as three, five or seven, and that only God knows the length of their sleep. The dog who "stretches out his paws on the threshold" (verse 18) is counted in their number (verse 22), and so seems held holy. The hint at a place of worship built over the resting place (verse 21) is unclear, and the expression al-raqim (verse 9) is disputed: commentators take it as the name of the dog, as a place name, or as an inscription. ²

The Arabic commentators and historians filled the gaps in the Qur'anic text with much material from the Christian-Oriental tradition, so their accounts also matter for the transmission of the legend before Islam. Once it took root among Muslims, the legend was attached to places across the Islamic world, to a cave in Transjordan, in Cappadocia, in East Turkistan and in Spain, though it originally belongs to Ephesus. Over time the story drifted into the magical. This explains the custom of hanging leaves inscribed with the names of the sleepers, for blessing or against evil. The name of the dog, Kilmir, plays a special part: among the Turks of East Turkistan, and in Indonesia, it was customary to write on letters meant to be safe from loss the word kitmir, "registered". L. Massignon read the story from within, in the sense it has for Muslim believers. ²