The Sleepers in the Cave: Three Hundred Years of Refuge

They are young. They are afraid. The king has demanded that every person in his realm worship his gods, and these youths — some accounts say three, some say five, some say seven, the Quran itself declines to be certain — have refused. They have no army, no connections, no plan. They have only each other and a cave in the hillside and a prayer: Our Lord, grant us mercy from Yourself and prepare for us from our affair right guidance.

God seals their ears. They sleep.

The Quran describes their sleep with careful tenderness. They are turned from side to side, so that neither the right nor the left grows stiff. Their dog sleeps at the threshold with its paws stretched out. Anyone who glimpsed them would have fled in terror — there is something about sleeping people who do not age that violates the deepest instincts of the living. The sun itself moves around them, entering on the right when it rises and departing on the left when it sets, leaving them in perpetual cool shadow.

When they wake, they think they have slept a day, or perhaps part of a day. One of them is sent to the city for food, with careful instructions: be discreet, let no one know about us. The youth enters a city that no longer exists as he knew it. The coins he carries are antique. The people speak a language that has shifted. The Christian empire has replaced the pagan one. When he produces his coin, the seller stares. When the story comes out, the whole city floods toward the cave.

The Quran reports that the young men die shortly after, and that there was a dispute about whether to build a monument or a mosque over their resting place. The mosque faction won.

The story is almost certainly drawn from a much older Christian legend — the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, told in Greek and Syriac texts centuries before the Quran — but the Quran neither confirms nor denies this. It recounts the story, strips it of some details, adds the profound note of divine uncertainty (I do not know how many they were, the text says — even the narrator holds back), and uses it for its primary purpose: the proof of resurrection. If God can hold bodies in suspended time for three hundred years, death is not the end of consciousness but only a long sleep between one waking and another.