5. Al-Maaida

O my people, enter the Holy, the purified, Land which God has ordained for you, [which] He commanded you to enter, and this is Syria (al-shām), and do not turn back in flight, [do not] retreat in fear of the enemy, or you will end up as losers’, in your efforts.

They said, ‘O Moses, there are giants in it, those remaining of the people of ‘Ād, who were very tall and mighty; we will never enter it until they depart from it; if they depart from it then we will enter’, it.

There said, to them, two men of those who feared, contravening God’s command, and these were Joshua and Caleb — who were from among the leaders that Moses dispatched to bring back news of those giants — to whom God had been gracious, by making them virtuous, for they concealed what they had discovered about the giants, telling only Moses, unlike the other leaders, who divulged the news, and so the people became cowardly. ‘Enter against them by the gate!, the gate of the town, and have no fear of them, for they are bodies without hearts. For if you enter by it, you will be victorious: the two [Joshua and Caleb] said this because they were certain of God’s assistance and the fulfilment of His promise. Put your trust in God, if you are believers’.

He, Moses, thereupon, said, ‘My Lord, I control none but myself and my brother, and I control no one else to be able to force them to obedience. So separate, distinguish, us from the wicked folk’.

He, God, exalted be He, said, to him: ‘Then it, the Holy Land, shall be forbidden them, to enter, for forty years; they shall wander lost, bewildered, in the land — according to Ibn ‘Abbās this [land] was about nine parasangs [sc. 30 miles]; so do not grieve for the wicked folk’. It is reported that they would travel throughout the night earnestly, but in the morning would find themselves back where they had started. And they would travel all day, with the same result, until they all perished, except those under twenty years of age. It is said that they numbered 600,000. Moses and Aaron died in the wilderness, and this was a mercy for them, and a chastisement for those others. When Moses was on the verge of death, he asked his Lord to bring him close to the Holy Land, to within a stone’s throw, and He did, as related in hadīth. Joshua became a prophet sometime after his fortieth year and he was commanded to fight against the giants. So he sallied forth with those that remained by his side and he fought against them; it was a Friday and the sun stopped for him for an hour, until he had finished with fighting them. Ahmad [b. Hanbal] reported in his Musnad the [following] hadīth, ‘The sun was never detained for any human, except for Joshua during those days in which he marched towards the Holy House [of Jerusalem]’.

And recite, O Muhammad (s), to them, your people, the story, the tale, of the two sons of Adam, Abel and Cain, truthfully (bi’l-haqq is semantically connected to utlu, ‘recite’), how they each offered a sacrifice, to God, which in Abel’s case was a ram, and in Cain’s, some green crops, and it was accepted from one of them, namely, from Abel, when a fire came down from the heaven and consumed his offering, and not accepted from the other, that is, from Cain, and so he became furious and kept secret his envy until Adam left on pilgrimage. He said, to him, ‘I will surely slay you,’, and the other said, ‘Why?’, to which the first replied, ‘Because only your offering was accepted’. The other said, ‘God accepts only from the God-fearing’.

‘Yet if (la-in, the lām is for oaths) you extend your hand against me to slay me, I will not extend my hand against you to slay you; I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds, in slaying you.

I desire that you should end up with my sin, the sin of slaying me, and your own sin, the one that you had committed before, and so become an inhabitant of the Fire, whereas I do not want to end up with your sin if I were to slay you, and become one of them. God, exalted be He, says: that is the requital of the evildoers’.

Then his soul prompted him, it seduced him, to slay his brother, so he slew him and became one of the losers, by slaying him. And he did not know what to do with him, because he was the first of the Children of Adam to die on earth, and so he carried him on his back.