00:00So, here's the bottom line. Some surahs have a pretty interesting story behind them. Not every surah. Not every surah has a story behind it. Or a story that we know of for sure. Some surahs we know a story for sure.
00:26So surah Al-Fath, for example, surah number 48 of the Qur'an has a pretty elaborate story. You can call it the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. You familiar with the incident? Right? If you don't understand the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, you're going to have a hard time understanding surah number what? 48. You need like a really good study of the entire treaty, every little detail before you get to Allah's commentary on that treaty. That's important.
00:53So, or surah Al-Tawbah is at the occasion, the ninth surah is at the occasion of the conquest of Makkah. So, if you don't know what's happening with the Romans, if you don't know what's happening with the Meccans, you don't know what's happening between, you know, Ali radiallahu anhu and Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and on their trip to Hajj and all of these details, if you don't know that, you're going to miss out on what Allah is talking about in surah Al-Tawbah.
01:15Some surahs have a pretty elaborate historical story behind them, and you better know. You better have a full picture of what's going on. We're actually entering a really interesting surah from that perspective. We're going to be studying Surah Al-Kahf, right?
01:29Now, what's remarkable about Surah Al-Kahf, there are many things, many narrations about Surah Al-Kahf. We're going to explore a bunch of them together, inshaAllah. But one of them that's really fascinating is that the Prophet ï·º was asked certain quiz questions to see if he's really a prophet.
01:46And he was asked about who the people of the cave are. Right? Now, the people of the cave, I'll let you know now, I'll give you a little hint now. The people of the cave are actually considered saints in Jacobite Christianity, in Syrian Christianity of the time, they were considered saints. They were believed to have been discovered 120 or so years before the coming of the Prophet ï·º. I'll give you the full notes later. Relax, just listen for now. Okay?
02:13So this was a pretty big deal among the Christian community of the entire region. And the news spread so far that the Christian king from far off, like from Greece, actually came to pay them respects when they were discovered, according to their records.
02:27This is not the Islamic record, this is the Christian record. And they were such a big deal that for the last hundred or so years, this is before the birth of the Prophet ï·º, there were songs made about them in Greek.
02:40And then the Greeks basically completely took over the story and it was lost on the Arabs, the Arab Christians.
02:46And about two years before the Prophet was born ï·º, a Christian monk actually translated the Greek songs back into Arabic and Aramaic, so the Christians could sing the songs of the priests.
02:58There are to this day churches. There are to this day churches that have murals of the seven sleepers of the cave.
03:04They have festivals every year. This was a very big deal to the Christian community.
03:09Now, if you don't know what they believe about the people of the cave, I mean we have some idea they have a story.
03:15We have some idea. If you don't go into the details of what the Christians had, what they knew about the people of the cave, what they believed about them,
03:23what songs were they singing? I'd like to know. What songs were they singing? Why was that a big deal to them?
03:30And then if you understand that history, then you look at Allah's commentary on the people of the cave, guess what happens?
03:38You're just left in shock, like whoa, Allah is commenting with such accuracy on a story that is not even owned by the Muslims, it's owned by who?
03:48The Christians and not even the average Christian, the scholars among the Christians.
03:52And Allah is correcting their story for them.
03:55Allah is correcting their story for them.
03:58Now, if you don't know that history, you won't know that there's anything to compare it to.
04:02So you'll just read the history on its own, the story on its own, which is great.
04:05But man, if you study the historical context, it brings out some cool stuff, man.
04:11You just sit there and read that and you go, whoa, that was awesome.
04:17That is awesome.
04:18You know, just to get your appetite wet a little bit, because that's coming later.
04:24You know, they believe that these young men who were caught in the cave, who had a dog with them, according to them, too, they got caught.
04:33They weren't able to stay asleep.
04:36They got caught.
04:36They tried to hide in a cave, but the king caught them.
04:38He caught up with them.
04:39And then he buried them alive.
04:41He just had rocks put on the mouth of the cave and just buried them alive.
04:45And so they died.
04:47Then 40 years, or assumed dead.
04:48Then 40 years later, not 309, 40 years later, some shepherd came and moved some rocks.
04:54And he found these guys in there and they woke up.
04:56And that was the whole story to them.
04:58Is that the story you have in the Quran?
05:00No.
05:01No.
05:02See, the Quran, it comes to the defense of the actual events of those people, because those people are Muslims.
05:09Which is also important, because to them, those people were actually saints of Christianity.
05:14They preached Jesus as Lord, which they didn't.
05:16So Allah corrects the records, sets the records straight.
05:20Okay, so we'll see more about that.
05:22In other words, what I'm trying to say is, when you talk about historical context,
05:25sometimes you have to go to the Islamic sources to understand the historical context.
05:29But sometimes you have to go outside the Islamic sources to understand the historical context.
05:33But understand my thought process.
05:35I am not going to non-Muslim sources, to Christian sources, to Jewish sources.
05:39Yes, I will go to Jewish sources too.
05:41I'll even go to Egyptian sources.
05:42I don't care.
05:44But I'm not going to go there to find truth.
05:46I'm going to go there to find what they have, to see how Allah comments on what they have.
05:52In my method, what's beyond criticism?
05:55Quran.
05:57Everything else is subject to criticism.
06:00You know where I found this commentary on the people of the cave?
06:02One of my students pointed me towards it.
06:05It's a book written on the Quran and its biblical subtext.
06:09And the intent of the author is very interesting.
06:12The intent of the author, he's a disbeliever of course, he's a non-Muslim.
06:15The intent of the author is that the Quran copied stories from Christian and Jewish tradition,
06:22but did so unsuccessfully.
06:26In other words, it didn't copy the story accurately.
06:30That's the intent with which he did exhaustive research.
06:32And I'm really grateful that he did that research, because I'm just looking at all of his research,
06:40and I'm reverse engineering it and saying, yes, the Quran is completely in contradiction
06:44with the record that you have, because the Quran set the record straight.
06:48We're looking at the same exact research, but we're looking at it from two different perspectives.
06:52I'm looking at the Quran as muhaymin.
06:54The Quran comes and protects the truth of what happens before.
06:58What may have happened before.
06:59You understand?
07:00So that's about historical context.
07:02So this will be important for some surahs, especially for Surah Al-Kahf.
07:05This is really, really important.
07:06Actually, the first story in Surah Al-Kahf sets the tone for the rest of the surah, as far
07:10as I'm concerned.
07:11Okay.
07:12So that's A.
07:13Is that clear?
07:14A?
07:15We're good?
07:15I guess we're not going to finish this today.
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