Editor,
Last Wednesday, I stopped to listen to an argument between Christians and Muslims taking place in front of Zimmerman Library. I stopped for only a few minutes, but what I heard was exceedingly telling.
As I arrived, one of the Christian preachers was scoffing at a story from the 18th sura of the Quran about a group of monotheists who hid from persecution in a cave and slept for many years, awak ing in a changed world. From the point of view of the Christian preacher, this story made no sense and was on its face unbelievable.
"Why would anyone believe this?" he asked.
The preacher did not know this story to be from the Quran, but one of the Muslim students explained that it was. I will not point to the folly inherent in a proponent of fundamentalist interpretations of scripture mocking the believability of another faith's miracle stories. However, I will point to the irony inherent in the fact that the specific Quranic story this preacher chose to mock, that of the Ashab al-kahf or "Companions of the Cave," was in fact a Christian story long before it was a Muslim story and appears in Syriac, Greek and Latin texts predating Islam.
Like the story of the Ashab al-ukhdud - "Companions of the Trench" - which very early Muslim authors connected with the sixth century persecution of Najrani Christians in Yemen, the Ashab al-kahf are revered in both traditions. They are roundly identified with the famous Sleepers of Ephesus, who, as the Quran says, were monotheists - Christians in the Christian version of the story - who entered a cave to escape religious persecution and slept for many years, awaking to a very different world.
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The Muslim student and the Christian preacher were equally ignorant of the lineage of that narrative and the intimate bond it suggests between their faiths. Imagine where their conversation might have gone if either had been willing to listen to the other, or at least had been a bit more knowledgeable about the history of his faith. If this scene were not emblematic of the root causes of so many horrors around the globe, it would have simply been amusing. Instead, however, it underscored for me the wisdom of Ayat 103-4 of Surat al-kahf (Q18:103-4): "Shall I tell you whose labor will be wasted? Theirs whose labor is misspent ... even though they think they are doing good things."
Thomas Sizgorich
UNM faculty
