وَتَرَى ٱلشَّمْسَ إِذَا طَلَعَت تَّزَٰوَرُ عَن كَهْفِهِمْ ذَاتَ ٱلْيَمِينِ وَإِذَا غَرَبَت تَّقْرِضُهُمْ ذَاتَ ٱلشِّمَالِ … وَتَحْسَبُهُمْ أَيْقَاظًا وَهُمْ رُقُودٌ وَنُقَلِّبُهُمْ ذَاتَ ٱلْيَمِينِ وَذَاتَ ٱلشِّمَالِ وَكَلْبُهُم بَاسِطٌ ذِرَاعَيْهِ بِٱلْوَصِيدِ
"When the sun rose it inclined away from their cave to the right, and when it set it passed them by, cutting away on the left… You would suppose them awake, though they were asleep. We turned them to the right and to the left. And their dog lay at the entrance, its two forelegs stretched out."
These two verses are the most detailed description in the sūra, and the kind of detail is worth recording:
| Detail | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Tazāwaru … taqriḍuhum | The direction of the sun — the position of the cave |
| Taḥsabuhum ayqāẓan wa hum ruqūd | The gap between appearance and reality |
| Wa nuqallibuhum | Their being turned — in a passive state |
| Wa kalbuhum bāsiṭun dhirāʿayhi | The dog — at the door, its legs stretched out |
تَزَاوَرُ — root ز-و-ر: to incline, to turn aside. (The "falsehood/crookedness" branch of the root was treated in al-Furqān at 25/72 as zūr.) تَقْرِضُ — root ق-ر-ض: to cut, to cut across. The root was treated in al-Baqara at 2/245 (qarḍan ḥasanā) — there the picture of a loan as "cutting off and setting apart" was given. Here it is the sun's light cutting across.
I record this as my own reading: while recounting what is extraordinary (a sleep of years) the verse goes into ordinary details — the angle of the sun, the direction they lay in, the dog at the door. And these are given not as a list of miracles but as the description of a scene. Indeed the ninth verse had already asked: am ḥasibta anna aṣḥāba'l-kahfi … kānū min āyātinā ʿajabā — "did you suppose it a wonder?"
The mention of the dog belongs to this same frame: it is not counted among the protagonists of the story; it stands at the door as a part of the scene.