leaves to stray) 18. You would have thought they were awake, though they lay
asleep. We turned them over, to the right and the left, with their dog stretching out
its forelegs at the entrance. (Q18:17–18)^60
God eventually wakes them, and they wonder how long they have been
sleeping. Settling on the answer that God knows best, one of them takes his
silver coins to town to buy some food without disclosing their identity, lest
they still be captured and forced to convert.“In this way We brought them
to people’s attention so that they might know that God’s promise [of
resurrection] is true and that there is no doubt about the Last Hour,
[though] people argue among themselves”(Q18:21). The theme initially
foreshadowing the resurrection of Jesus comes to indicate the resurrection
of all of humanity on Judgment Day. As in the Syriac version, the people
seek to erect a building or place of worship over them and argue about their
number. The moral of the story, indicated by one of the Sleepers, is to say
“My Lord knows best”and“do not say of anything,‘I will do that tomor-
row’without adding‘God willing’”(Q18:22)–the statement of which, in
the phraseinshallah, is ubiquitous in the Islamic world. The Quranic text
repurposes a cult devoted to the affirmation of Jesus’divinity into one that
reaffirms the unitary omniscience and omnipotence of God.^61 The story
became elaborated in commentaries, most famously by the historian al-
Ya’qubi (d. 897), who describes the Sleepers as accompanied by a shepherd
and his dog, named Qatmir.^62 Often denigrated in recent Islamic dis-
courses, the dog is added to Islamic renditions of the scene which otherwise
adopt an iconography recognizable from Christian manuscripts [Figure 7].
Al-Hallaj interpreted the parable as refusing all worship not directly
uniting with God. In addition to his more famous utterance“I am truth,”
his coded message to his shaykh to“destroy your Kaaba,”meaning to
destroy the importance of self as the last barrier from God, was interpreted
as political support of the Qarmatian attack on the Kaaba in Mecca. He was
executed in 922, a year identified by the Isma’ilis as the year of“the
Awakening of the Seven Sleepers,”indicating the Mahdi’s second coming.
The comparison between his death and the crucifixion is reflected in the
iconography of witnessing shared with European examples and employed
in an early sixteenth-century MughalDivanof the poet and hagiographer
Hasan Dihlawi, a close friend of Amir Khosrau, to commemorate his
martyrdom [Figure 8].^63(^60) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 184. (^61) Reynolds, 2006 : 720. (^62) Donner, 2008 :36n. 85.
(^63) Hanif, 2002 : 189.
200 The Transcendent Image