The Quran

Preface

وَكَذٰلِكَ بَعَثناهُم لِيَتَساءَلوا بَينَهُم ۚ قالَ قائِلٌ مِنهُم كَم لَبِثتُم ۖ قالوا لَبِثنا يَومًا أَو بَعضَ يَومٍ ۚ قالوا رَبُّكُم أَعلَمُ بِما لَبِثتُم فَابعَثوا أَحَدَكُم بِوَرِقِكُم هٰذِهِ إِلَى المَدينَةِ فَليَنظُر أَيُّها أَزكىٰ طَعامًا فَليَأتِكُم بِرِزقٍ مِنهُ وَليَتَلَطَّف وَلا يُشعِرَنَّ بِكُم أَحَدًا

Yusuf Ali

Such (being their state), we raised them up (from sleep), that they might question¹ each other. Said one of them, “How long have ye stayed (here)?” They said, “We have stayed (perhaps) a day, or part of a day.” (At length) they (all) said, “God (alone) knows best how long ye have stayed here.... Now send ye then one of you with this money of yours² to the town: let him find out which is the best³ food (to be had) and bring some to you, that (ye may) satisfy your hunger therewith: And let him behave with care and courtesy, and let him not inform any one about you.

This is the point of the story. Their own human impressions were to be compared, each with the other. They were to be made to see that with the best goodwill and the most honest enquiry they might reach different conclusions; that they were not to waste their time in vain controversies, but to get on to the main business of life; and that God alone had full knowledge of the things that seem to us so strange, or inconsistent, or inexplicable, or that produce different impressions on different minds. If they entered the Cave in the morning and woke up in the afternoon, one of them might think they had been there only a few hours-only part of the day. This relative or fallacious impression of Time also gives us an inkling of the state when there will be no Time, of the Resurrection when all our little impressions of this life will be corrected by the final Reality. This mystery of time had puzzled many contemplative minds. Cf. “Dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our days” (Thomas Wolfe in “Of Time and the River”) (Cf. n. 2949).
They now give up barren controversy and come to the practical business of life. But their thoughts are conditioned by the state of things that existed when they entered the Cave. The money they carried was the money coined in the reign of the monarch who persecuted the Religion of Unity and favoured the false cults of Paganism.
Best food: i.e. purest, most wholesome, perhaps also most suitable for those who rejected idol worship, i.e., not dedicated to idols. For they still imagined the world in the same state in which they had known it before they entered the Cave.