The Companions of the Cave

The chapter of the Cave introduces the account as a sign among the signs of God: young men who took refuge in a cave and prayed for mercy and for right guidance in their affair, whose ears God sealed for a number of years, and who were then raised up so that it might be known which of the two parties had better counted the time they stayed. They are described as youths who believed in their Lord and were increased in guidance, who stood and declared that their Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth and that they would not call on any god besides him, and who withdrew from their people and from what they worshipped. The sun is described as passing to the right of the cave when it rises and cutting past them on the left when it sets, while they lie in an open space within it, and they are turned to the right and to the left in their sleep, with their dog stretching out its forelegs at the threshold.

The passage is unusually explicit about the limits of what is known. On the question of how many they were, it reports that people say three and the fourth their dog, five and the sixth their dog, guessing at the unseen, and seven and the eighth their dog, and instructs that the answer is that the Lord knows best how many they were and that only a few know. It gives three hundred years and nine more, and adds that God knows best how long they stayed. This refusal to settle detail is the passage's own subject as much as the sleep is, and the instruction that follows, not to say of anything that one will do it tomorrow without adding if God wills, is drawn from it directly.

A Christian legend of the same shape was in circulation well before the Qur'an. In it, seven young Christians of Ephesus refuse to sacrifice during a persecution under the emperor Decius in the middle of the third century, give away their property, and hide in a cave in a nearby mountain; the entrance is walled up on the emperor's order, and they sleep. Nearly two centuries later the stones are removed by workmen and the sleepers wake, believing they have slept one night, and send one of their number into the city to buy bread. He is bewildered by the crosses on the buildings, and the money he offers, struck under a long-dead emperor, is what betrays him: he is taken for a treasure-finder and brought before the bishop and the authorities, and the whole company is discovered. In the standard telling they die shortly afterward, having been raised as a demonstration of the resurrection of the body at a time when it was being disputed.

The legend is attested in Syriac by the sixth century and in Latin in the same period through Gregory of Tours, and it was widely known in the eastern Mediterranean and in Arabia before the rise of Islam. The two versions differ in exactly the ways that matter to each tradition. The Christian legend fixes the number at seven, names them, dates them, and makes the point about bodily resurrection explicit. The Qur'anic account leaves the number unfixed, declines to date them beyond a figure it then qualifies, and turns the episode toward trust in God and toward the folly of speaking with certainty about the unseen. Both are told about the same kind of event, and neither is a copy of the other in any sense that the sources allow anyone to demonstrate.