his own hand at the Battle of Badr, looked at the cave, When his companions suggested that they enter, he replied: 'Why should we? I see a large spider's web which appears to have been there since before Muhammad was born.'" [^32]
[^32]:See, Letters, 185-6. [Tr.]
I suddenly saw a miracle in the conditional particle "if" (lau) and an elevated flash of miraculousness, which dispelled my anxiety. It was like this:
The Sura of the Spider (al-'Ankabūt) was revealed in Mecca. The leaders of the Quraysh had not come to believe in the Prophet (UWBP) and were conspiring to kill him, yet the smallest and weakest of creatures was going to oppose their vicious assaults and defeat them. That is to say, by indicating this, that although the spider's web, its house, is the flimsiest veil, it was going to defeat those powerful chiefs, the verse was saying:
"If they had known they were going to be confounded by the frailest of creatures, they would not have embarked on this conspiracy."
Just as the verse, "This day We shall save you in your body" (Q 10:92) displays an historical miracle with one word, [^33] so with the allusion in the words, "if they but knew" (Q 29:41) in the Meccan sura above, it displays a flash of miraculousness by indicating the wondrous divine protection in the incident in the cave at Hira and in the predictive prophetic miracle. I saw that to call this sura The Spider and call attention to its insignificant web was completely apt and conclusively rebuffed any doubts or uncertainty concerning the verse, I offered endless thanks to Almighty God, for I had understood that there were flashes of miraculousness in the Qur'an's suras and verses, and even in its words and phrases, and even in its letters.
[^33]:In The Miracles of the Qur'an (the Twenty-Fifth Word), it says: "'This day We shall save you in your body' (Q 10:92). By saying to the Pharaoh, who is drowning: 'Today I am going to save your body which will drown,' it is expressing a death-tainted, exemplary rule of the Pharaoh's lives, which was, as a consequence of the idea of metempsychosis and mummifying the bodies of all of them, to take them from the past and send them to be viewed by the generations of the future. And this present century a body was discovered which was the very body of Pharaoh, thrown up on the seashore where he drowned. The verse thus states a miraculous sign of the Unseen, that the body was to be borne on the waves of centuries and cast up from the sea of time onto the shore of this century." See, Words, 414. Note: As has been published in the newspapers, the Europeans found that very body of the Pharaoh and took it to be displayed in their museums. [Author]
The Enduring One, He is the Enduring One!
Your ill brother,
S a i d N u r s i ∗∗∗