The Cave
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[18:86]
[And he marched westwards] till, when he came to the setting of the sun, it appeared to him that it was setting in a dark, turbid sea; and nearby he found a people [given to every kind of wrongdoing].
We said: "O thou Two-Horned One! Thou mayest either cause [them] to suffer or treat them with kindness!"

---

* v.86 : I.e., the westernmost point of his expedition (Rāzī).
* Or: “abundance of water” – which, according to many philologists (cf. Tāj al-‘Arūs), is one of the meanings of ‘ayn (primarily denoting a “spring”). As for my rendering of the phrase “he found it (wajadahā) setting...,” etc., as “it appeared to him that it was setting,” see Rāzī and Ibn Kathīr, both of whom point out that we have here a metaphor based on the common optical illusion of the sun’s “disappearing into the sea”; and Rāzī explains this, correctly, by the fact that the earth is spherical. (It is interesting to note that, according to him, this explanation was already advanced in the – now lost – Qur’ān-commentary of Abū ‘Alī al-Jubbā’ī, the famous Mu‘tazilī scholar who died in 303 H., which corresponds to 915 or 916 of the Christian era.)
* This divine permission to choose between two possible courses of action is not only a metonymic statement of the freedom of will accorded by God to man, but establishes also the important legal principle of istihsān (social or moral preference) open to a ruler or government in deciding as to what might be conducive to the greatest good (maslahah) of the community as a whole: and this is the first “lesson” of the parable of Dhu ’l-Qarnayn.