SURAH AL KAHF is a sūrah about fitnah. It has four great narratives: the People of the Cave, the two garden-owners, Mūsā and Khiḍr, and Dhū l-Qarnayn. Each map onto a trial that the believer will face: the fitnah of faith, of wealth, of knowledge, of power. What connects all four stories is not that the protagonists lacked signs. It is that they faced the ongoing human problem of how to respond to signs that were already present.
Between these stories, at ayah 54, Allāh steps outside the storytelling frame and tells us something profound about human nature.
وَلَقَدْ صَرَّفْنَا فِي هَذَا الْقُرْآنِ لِلنَّاسِ مِن كُلِّ مَثَلٍ ۚ وَكَانَ الْإِنسَانُ أَكْثَرَ شَيْءٍ جَدَلًا
We have surely set forth in this Quran every (kind of) lesson for people, but humankind is the most argumentative of all beings. (al Kahf 54)
The word that carries everything here is ṣarrafnā, from the root ṣ-r-f, to turn, to direct, to channel. In its intensive form it means to turn something over repeatedly, to present it from every face and angle. It is the image of a craftsman rotating an object under the light so that nothing remains hidden. Allāh is saying: We have done this with the truth. We have turned it toward you from every direction. Narrative. Warning. Parable. Historical example. Natural imagery. Akhirah scene. Every cognitive and imaginative entry point that could reach a human heart has been used. The laqad at the opening of the āyah, one of Arabic’s strongest affirmation structures, is Allāh bearing witness to His own exhaustive effort on behalf of human beings.
And then the second half of the āyah arrives like a closing door.
Wa kāna l-insānu akthara shay’in jadalā. Man has ever been, kāna, the enduring past tense describing a permanent characteristic, the most argumentative of all things. Not occasionally argumentative. Not argumentative under pressure. More than anything else in creation, this is what the human being does. Birds migrate. Planets orbit. Man argues.
The word jadal deserves to be understood better. It is not careful, sincere reflection. It is not genuine questioning that seeks an answer. Jadal is the argument that has already decided it will not be convinced. Its root carries the image of twisting rope, the contortion of a position being held against the evidence rather than shaped by it. The classical commentators are explicit: this is the contentiousness of someone who opposes truth with falsehood even after the examples have been delivered and understood.
This is what makes the structure of the āyah so powerful. The divine effort is placed directly beside the human response. We turned it over from every angle, and man argues. The incompleteness of the human response is measured against the completeness of the divine provision. The problem, the Qur’an is saying, has never been on Allāh’s side of the equation.
Now consider where we stand.
The most painful instance of this āyah is not the disbeliever who rejects the ‘aqīdah wholesale. That rejection, however grievous, has a certain consistency to it.
The more searching indictment falls on those who recite this Qur’an, who pray toward the same qiblah, who name their children after the Ṣaḥābah, and who yet produce, with great sophistication and apparent sincerity, every argument against the implementation of Islam as a complete system of life.
In Muslim-majority countries today, the arguments are not made from ignorance. They are made by educated people who have access to the same Qur’an, the same history, the same evidence. And the evidence is not ambiguous. The Western model whose frameworks they borrow to argue against Islamic governance is visibly, measurably collapsing, family dissolution, loneliness epidemics, the unravelling of any shared moral foundation, a spiritual emptiness, economic inequality, clear hypocrisy to claimed values. The examples are no longer only in the text. It is walking around in plain sight. And still the argument persists that the Islamic alternative is the dangerous, untested, impractical option.
That is this ayah in contemporary dress.
The sign of jadal, as distinct from honest doubt, is that it does not stay still. Answer the democracy objection and it becomes a human rights objection. Answer that and it becomes a minorities question. Answer that and it becomes an economics question. The specific positions shift, but the resistance remains constant. The argument is not in pursuit of truth. It is in pursuit of a conclusion already reached, seeking whatever intellectual cover is currently available.
The āyah’s kāna should give the da’wah carrier both sobriety and stability. This pattern is not new. Allāh named it fourteen centuries ago as the enduring characteristic of the human being. The Muslim arguing against implementation in a Muslim-majority country is not a novel species, he is the latest version of a figure the Qur’an already described, already accounted for, already addressed.
The āyah that follows immediately, asks what, precisely, is preventing people from believing when the guidance has arrived.
وَمَا مَنَعَ ٱلنَّاسَ أَن يُؤْمِنُوٓا۟ إِذْ جَآءَهُمُ ٱلْهُدَىٰ وَيَسْتَغْفِرُوا۟ رَبَّهُمْ إِلَّآ أَن تَأْتِيَهُمْ سُنَّةُ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ أَوْ يَأْتِيَهُمُ ٱلْعَذَابُ قُبُلًۭا
And nothing prevents people from believing when guidance comes to them and from seeking their Lord’s forgiveness except (their demand) to meet the same fate of earlier deniers or that the torment would confront them face to face. (al Kahf 55)
The Qur’an’s answer is stark: they are waiting either for the fate of the past nations to overtake them, or to see the punishment arrive before their eyes directly. They will not move until the cost of not moving becomes impossible to ignore.
That is a grim prognosis. But it is an honest one. And we see it play out as the ummah lurches from one disaster to another with such people still looking to anything and everything but Islam.
The task of those who carry this dawah is not to be surprised by jadal, nor to be defeated by it. Allāh did not promise that the examples would always be received. He promised that it would always be delivered. The responsibility ends with the delivery. The response belongs to Allāh.
| QUR’ANIC REFLECTION · SURAH AL-KAHF 54 |
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