subset of rare and wondrous things (‘ajab).^56 The moniker was adopted by
Sufipoets who took on the identity of the excluded to express other worldly
wisdom.
Several Sufithinkers, including al-Hallaj and al-Shushtari (1212–1269),
associate the state ofghurbawith the Seven Sleepers and their state of
perpetual wakefulness,tawakkul, the mental state of perfect abandonment
to God in which God speaks to them, a model forghurba,“a life of love
within death.”Recognizing the passage, regularly recited during the com-
munal Friday prayer, as the heart of Islamic faith, the Orientalist Louis
Massignon (1883–1962) explains that“those who thus sacrifice their life,
like those who sacrifice in a persecution, are not the dead, but the living.
They are resuscitated.”^57
This understanding emerges directly from the Quranic rendition of a Syriac
homily.^58 Related by a Christian bishop named Jacob of Sarug (d. 521 CE), the
most famous late antique version of the narrative tells of the Roman emperor
Decius who orders everybody in Ephesus to sacrifice to the pagan gods. Some
boys of leading families refuse, are denounced, sentenced toflogging, and
escape to a nearby cave. There they pray to God, who raises their spirits to
heaven and sends an angel to watch over them as Decius orders the cave’s
entrance to be walled in. When the boys awaken, one goes to buy bread in
town. There, he discovers that his coins are 372 years old, and Ephesus has
become Christian. The emperor Theodosius offers to build a shrine at the cave,
but the boys decline, declare their experience to be truth of the resurrection,
and enter eternal sleep as the emperor covers them with his mantle.^59
The tale reappears with minor modifications as the second-longest
continuous narrative in the Quran. Whereas the Syriac version thematized
resurrection, thereby recognizing Jesus as the son of God (which consti-
tutes the primary Islamic objection to Christian doctrine), the Quran
frames the narrative by warning against those asserting that“God has
offspring”(Q18.4). The story of the Companions of the Cave follows,
first in abridged form, and then as an explicated narrative. It relates how
an indeterminate number of young believers were called on to worship
other gods, and God offers them refuge in the cave.
- You could have seen the [light of the] sun as it rose, moving away to the right of
their cave, and when it set, moving away to the left of them, while they lay in the
wide space inside the cave. (This is one of God’s signs: those people God guides are
the rightly guided, but you willfind no protector to lead to the right path those he
(^56) Berlekamp, 2011 : 23. (^57) Massignon, 1969 : 150. (^58) Griffeth, 2008 : 109.
(^59) van der Horst, 2011 : 107–108.
Exile and the Seven Sleepers 199