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’.

They said ‘O Moses we will never enter it so long as they are in it. So go forth you and your Lord and fight them we will be sitting here’ away from the fighting.

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 600000. 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.