A Reflection on Surah The Cave (18), Part I: Our Actions Will Outlive the World of Becoming 

“Tell them, too, what the life of this world is like: We send water down from the skies and the earth’s vegetation absorbs it, but soon the plants turn to dry stubble scattered about by the wind: God has power over everything. Wealth and children are the attractions of this worldly life, but lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope. One day We shall make the mountains move, and you will see the earth as an open plain. We shall gather all people together, leaving no one. They will be lined up before your Lord: ‘Now you have come to Us as We first created you, although you claimed We had not made any such appointment for you.’ The record of their deeds will be laid open and you will see the guilty, dismayed at what they contain, saying, ‘Woe to us! What a record this is! It does not leave any deed, small or large, unaccounted for!’ They will find everything they ever did laid in front of them: your Lord will not be unjust to anyone.” (18:45-49)

“We have adorned the earth with attractive things so that We may test people to find out which of them do best, but We shall reduce all this to barren dust.” (18:7-8)

I wrote a research paper on the surah The Cave (18) in Graduate Theological Union.  I now read the surah again and get stuck in the first verses, because per my spiritual changes, the text changes.   I started reading it and in the very beginning the verse above stood out, simple as it might seem, true as it is beyond any doubt, strangely enough, the most forgotten.  For Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, and Marx’s Materialism, there was no other choice but to glorify the decay of matter into everlasting cycle of birth in matter, because they see nothing but this world of becoming, as I used to, and what remains for us but to glorify the cycle of samsara?  In the same spirit, I wrote this little poem: “What a light that lasts even when it lapses// What a sound that stays even when silence reigns// What a rain that outlives the impermanence:// A Blooming Tree.”--I should have added:"//Within God's Providence".  

I see myself then lost and in a sorry state of mind, self-deceptive and distracted easily to take the beauty of the world everlasting and worshipping it rather than to see God in the beauty of a blooming tree.  It is real; it is happening, and it is constantly there: the veil of deception-ignorance-inclination in all sincerity.  In desperation, we seek the eternal ground of becoming and if we can’t find it, we make “matter” or “will-to-power”, or “becoming as such” our god.  And the message of religions is that there is no god but God, meaningfully so, because in worshipping each false god, we will fall spritually-ethically. 

For disbelievers, there is no other way out but to bow down to another false god—a goddess, matter, power, or autonomous subject— that potentially gives rise to caprice and seeking one’s desires, one way or another.  Don’t forgot Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus and believed “birth, flowering and decline are very general, very vague notions under which, to be sure, everything can be arranged, but through which nothing can be understood.  Decay itself is prefigured in the living; its shape should therefore be just as much grasped in its specific characteristic as the shape of life.” (Marx’s Dissertation).  Scientific exploration of matter in birth and decay is the only god to whom Marx and Nietzsche bowed down in their de-deification of nature.  And this praxis and its ramifications are the only lasting things that will outlive and transcend the world of becoming, because our actions will become the measure of our eternal life in the world to come.  As Foucault once said: “We know what we do, frequently we know ‘why we do what we do’, but we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does!”  Two centuries after Marx and Nietzsche we can see now ‘what we did’ did to us: the horror of worshipping the self, the self-consciousness, disconnection and alienation from nature, by either deifying it in New Age goddess’s stories and Shamanistic worship, or in worshipping self-consciousness of autonomous subject in Nietzsche and Marx.  In the preface of his dissertation Marx wrote:    

Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus: “Not the man who denies the gods, worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.”

Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus: In simple words, I hate the pack of gods [Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound] is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside. But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, “Hermes: Be sure of this, I would not change my state of evil fortune for your servitude. Better to be the servant of this rock Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.” Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.” (Marx, Berlin, March 1841)  

Surely Marx knew how to write and how to confound things: there is a time for rebel against false gods and there is a time to obey the true God.  But Marx throws the baby out with the bathwater and comes to accept the horror of “human self-consciousness as the highest divinity” that brought us to this ruinous moment: human-being worshipping itself!  Another impious false god whom multitude have been worshipping for the last two centuries.  It is striking to me to read these words now.  Did not the Quran predict these all?

Indeed, the surah Cave (18) is the story of the People of the Cave who rebelled against the false gods of multitude—but not falling into worshipping their own self-consciousness, but God’s guidance came to separate them from falsehood, which was not attainable in their time.  Thus they become a sign of God to the generations to come by putting them in sleep and preserving them for a few centuries, over which a place of worship was built up.  This is God’s dialectic, if you wish to hear this Hegelian-Marxian term.  The People of the Cave rebelled against false gods but found God’s guidance, and in turn, turned into signs of God for guiding others.  Marx rebelled against gods and set his own self-consciousness as God, and hence he and his followers fell into horror of worshipping “autonomous subject” and “materialism”, which misguided millions of people into Gulags and hell fire.  I was one of them.

God’s words everlastingly echo for those who have ears to hear, which I didn’t have as well as 19^th c. Western world up to now, including Marx and Nietzsche; we were all deaf to divine message.  This is the message of God echoing through history: choose no god but God, no gods and goddesses, not yourself, nor your consciousness, nor your desires, nor your senses, nor your reason, nor your will, not your whims, not the earth, nor the universe, nothing but God, and stay attune to the world through this medium—constant remembrance of God--to refrain from excess in your actions.  Excess is destructive and religious bigotry as well distorted the message of God and disconnected us from the world and consequently the medium of remembrance withered away and gave rise to the age of Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche.  The story of the believers who escaped persecution, kept in the Cave for a few centuries unscathed, is this remembrance:

“[Prophet], We shall tell you their story as it really was. They were young men who believed in their Lord, and We gave them more and more guidance. We gave strength to their hearts when they stood up and said, ‘Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and earth. We shall never call upon any god other than Him, for that would be an outrageous thing to do. These people of ours have taken gods other than Him. Why do they not produce clear evidence about them? Who could be more unjust than someone who makes up lies about God? Now that you have left such people, and what they worshipped instead of God, take refuge in the cave. God will shower His mercy on you and make you an easy way out of your ordeal.’” (18:13-16)

As I mentioned, at the beginning of the surah God depicts a picture of impermanence and becoming for us as the major parable of the surah.  The point of this picture is to remind us that nothing remains but the Face of God, and we ought not to fall into oblivion of Being, which sustains beings.  God is the source of Being and has created the world as a field of growth for us: “We have adorned the earth with attractive things so that We may test people to find out which of them do best, but We shall reduce all this to barren dust.” (18:7-8)

In contrast to this picture, God shows that the ground of Being and permanence is in God’s hands:

“You could have seen the [light of the] sun as it rose, moving away to the right of their cave, and when it set, moving away to the left of them, while they lay in the wide space inside the cave. (This is one of God’s signs: those people God guides are rightly guided, but you will find no protector to lead to the right path those He leaves to stray.) You would have thought they were awake, though they lay asleep. We turned them over, to the right and the left, with their dog stretching out its forelegs at the entrance. If you had seen them, you would have turned and run away, filled with fear of them.” (18:17-18)

The surah Cave (18) consistently shows that the world of becoming is regulated by God and we will be lost if we seek endurance in the earth or any other source of power, including human-beings themselves and their sciences and technology.  This is a crucial point which we should digest fully: Western Enlightenment gave “autonomy of reason” the status of a god, and consequently its scientism, as a new religion, gave rise to unbridled technology, which is now in the hands of unbridled corporations, detrimental to species and ourselves.  Now, in the age of Anthropocene and 6^th mass extinction, against the destructive dominance of our technology, in an interview Heidegger commented: only a god can save us!  The Quran reminds us that whenever we forget—existentially forget-- that everything is in God’s hand, we will go astray:

“Tell them the parable of two men: for one of them We made two gardens of grape vines, surrounded them with date palms, and put corn fields in between; both gardens yielded fruit and did not fail in any way; We made a stream flow through them, and so he had abundant fruit. One day, while talking to his friend, he said, ‘I have more wealth and a larger following than you.’ He went into his garden and wronged himself by saying, ‘I do not think this will ever perish, or that the Last Hour will ever come– even if I were to be taken back to my Lord, I would certainly find something even better there.’ His companion retorted, ‘Have you no faith in Him who created you from dust, from a small drop of fluid, then shaped you into a man? But, for me, He is God, my Lord, and I will never set up any partner with Him. If only, when you entered your garden, you had said, “This is God’s will. There is no power not [given] by God.” Although you see I have less wealth and offspring than you, my Lord may well give me something better than your garden, and send thunderbolts on your garden from the sky, so that it becomes a heap of barren dust; or its water may sink so deep into the ground that you will never be able to reach it again.’ And so it was: his fruit was completely destroyed, and there he was, wringing his hands over what he had invested in it, as it drooped on its trellises, and saying, ‘I wish I had not set up any partner to my Lord.’ He had no forces to help him other than God– he could not even help himself. In that situation, the only protection is that of God, the True God: He gives the best rewards and the best outcome.” (18:32-44)

In contrast to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same and Yes-saying to this world of impermanence, the Quran invites us to see this world, as good and pleasant as it is and adorned constantly by God as Good, as a shadow of the world to come, like a transient daydream both in terms of time and substance.  The Quran holds that the only lasting things are our actions, good or bad, and they will stay with us:

“Tell them, too, what the life of this world is like: We send water down from the skies and the earth’s vegetation absorbs it, but soon the plants turn to dry stubble scattered about by the wind: God has power over everything. Wealth and children are the attractions of this worldly life, but lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope.  One day We shall make the mountains move, and you will see the earth as an open plain. We shall gather all people together, leaving no one. They will be lined up before your Lord: ‘Now you have come to Us as We first created you, although you claimed We had not made any such appointment for you.’ The record of their deeds will be laid open and you will see the guilty, dismayed at what they contain, saying, ‘Woe to us! What a record this is! It does not leave any deed, small or large, unaccounted for!’ They will find everything they ever did laid in front of them: your Lord will not be unjust to anyone.” (18:45-49)