The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Islamic tradition
- Date of account
- Qur’anic and late antique tradition; Islamic textual interpretations before 1800
- Location
- Ephesus tradition; Qur’anic and Islamic literary settings
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The Seven Sleepers are a group of youths who hide in a cave and miraculously sleep for centuries before awakening. The story appears in Christian late-antique tradition and in Qur’an 18, where the sleepers are called the Companions of the Cave. Islamic exegetes debated their number, names, duration and location, while Christian communities associated them with Ephesus. The lead matters for comparing narrative transfer across religious communities, especially the transformation of a martyr legend into a Qur’anic sign of resurrection and divine power. Historical identification of the cave remains uncertain.
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