True, there is no cave in the Quranic passage. In fact, there is a cave in the Quran, in chapter eighteen, titled “The Cave.” It contains the famous tale of the Seven Sleepers (18:9–26), also known as the Companions of the Cave (G.S. Reynolds, The Emergence of Islam (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2012), pp. 154–156), but there the direction of the action is reversed. The Sleepers know the truth and are persecuted for it, so they fl ee to take refuge in a cave; Plato’s captives have been confi ned in a cave since childhood. That they will likely kill anyone who tells them the truth was demonstrated to Plato by the execution of his teacher Socrates. In the open desert in Muhammed’s Arabia, caves were places of refuge and meditation; there are reports of Christian renunciants known to Muhammed having retired to live in caves, and a prominent feature of his traditional biography is that it was his habit to meditate in a cave outside Mecca, where he received his fi rst revelation of the Quran. Plato’s Allegory and Ya-Sin share: (1) the neck fetter fi xing the head; (2) the spatial organization of barriers before and behind and covering above; (3) the theme of failure to see the truth and assault upon those who tell the truth, and (4) the theme of transcendent reality as a context of meaning. It is the combination of all four aspects together that constitutes the essential situation in both texts and makes them alike.
Muhammed was famously illiterate, but if he had been able to read, he could not have read any Greek philosophy because there is no evidence of a text of Plato or any Greek author translated into Arabic or Syriac by the seventh century.26 Even had he been able to read Greek, there is no evidence that Greek exemplars of any of Plato’s works existed in Mecca or Medina then.
Plato needed an instrument that would prevent turning of the head to see because his metaphor of sight for knowledge required that the captives both see the shadows on the wall and not see/know the reality behind them. No such fetter is needed in the Quran; there are no shadows to watch, yet the fetter is there. This incongruity indicates the survival of a trope; it does not quite make sense, and therefore indicates a habitual expression that does not quite fi t the context. The captives in Ya-Sin are being told the truth, yet they are prevented from knowing the reality of which revelation informs them not by an instrument that stops up their ears, but by a neck fetter, barriers before and behind, and a covering above them. If the object is to block vision, the hood fi tted over the head of a falcon hawk, to prevent it from being distracted and fl ying away, was a common trope in Arabic for lack of understanding and thus a more likely image to be used than a fetter round the neck. Awkward as the image of a neck fetter that prevents sight is, the association between sight and knowledge may have been strong enough to overcome the realistic requirement for an image that depicts a situation in which people cannot hear the truth. The survival in the Quran of the unlikely trope neck fetter as incapacity to know truth decisively connects the two texts. Now let us take a closer look at the terms used. Socrates begins, Next, then, compare the eff ect of education and that of the lack of it on our nature to an experience like this (Plato, Republic, C.D.C. Reeve, transl. (Indianapolis: Hackett 2004), p. 208). The word that the translator Reeve renders as “fetter” is desmós, a generic term for “binding” (Liddell & Scott) that did not carry specifi c associations of use, shape, or material from which it was made, let alone specify prevention of head movement. The impression that the desmós is a chain has been established by less scrupulous translations. The term in the Quranic passage is likewise generic, and I use the word “fetter” for both to avoid associations of material, shape and use implied by translations of Ya-Sin that render it as “chain,” “ring,” “collar,” “shackle,” or “yoke.” The Arabic word used in the Quran is the plural ’aghlâl, for which Badawi & Haleem give “fetters, collars, shackles.”36 There is obviously no etymological connection between desmós and ’aghlâl.
The Quranic account is relatively stark, but one remembers that its mode of statement is highly condensed and much of its eff ect comes from the quality of the Arabic. Yet how is it not inscrutably cruel that God would constrain disbelievers so that they cannot see the truth? The Arabic perfect tense used here can function as a “past tense of futurity,” indicating actions that are fi nished from the point of view of the speaker. 38 Although the actions have yet to occur, in the speaker’s experience they have already happened. Given that God is the speaker in the Quran, it may be that from God’s point of view everything that will happen has already happened—God refers to the Day of Judgment, for example, in the perfect tense. That would seem to imply predestination, given that what will happen on that day is already known to God, but we shall see shortly that commentators on the Quran viewed the fetters as the result of personal choices. There is no signifi cant disagreement among translators of Republic from Shorey to Griffi th over the literal meaning of “they are fi xed in the same place, able to see only in front of them, because their fetter prevents them from turning their heads around.”
One may object that the vertical, anabasis-catabasis aspect is indispensable to the Allegory and lost here. Plato’s captives must go “up” to see the truth. But in the context of the Quran, the truth is “up,” where God is. As we shall see, the commentator al-Kashani emphasized that the fetters prevent the captives from looking up to see God’s face. Revelation is a “sending down” (tanzîl). Anabasis-catabasis is the primary aspect of Muhammed’s miʿrâj (“ladder”) ascension to meet God, referred to in the Quran (17: 1, 53:6–11), elaborated in hadith, and thematically repeated countless times in later Islamic literature. What we fi nd in Ya-Sin is a transposition of pieces of the Allegory, not a reiteration of the whole; a survival of an ancient motif organized in a new context. In the open landscape of the desert, the human world is under the “dome of the heavens.”48 The Quran’s captives are trapped below and cannot look “up.” Plato’s Allegory has three metaphorical locations, related to preceding discussions in Republic of the tripartite soul and Divided Line, and reminiscent of the steps in Symposium’s “Staircase of Love”: (1) the level of shadows on the cave wall, (2) the level of people carrying objects throwing shadows on the wall, and (3) the transcendent level of the intelligible beyond the cave. Three degrees of knowing which may correspond to these levels are mentioned elsewhere in the Quran: ʿilm al-yaqīn (102:5), “knowledge of certainty” (knowledge learned from someone else) ʿayn al-yaqīn (102:7), “eye of certainty” (seen for oneself) and ḥ aqq al-yaqīn (56:95, 69:51), “reality of certainty” (experience of the truth of what one sees). These are steps demonstrating the transformative power of knowledge, described as a progress from hearing about fi re, to seeing fi re, to being consumed by fi re.